This Map Shows The Ultimate Literary Road Trips Across America

Remember the quickest, ultimate, and perfectly google-mapped road trip across America? Well, this one’s much the same, it just involves books!

Richard Kreitner and Steven Melendez of Atlas Obscura have been busy bees of late. How so? Well they’ve put this awesome literary road trip map of America together.

According to Kreitner, ‘The map is the result of a painstaking and admittedly quixotic effort to catalog the country as it has been described in the American road-tripping literature.’ And what a thing of beauty it is.

The colourful, and very detailed piece of digital cartography includes place-name references to 12 American books that focus on the theme of cross-country travel.

The fab piece of work even includes literary escapades that reach the shores of Hawaii!

From Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012), there’s tons of trips on the map you can try out for yourself. Best thing is, it even includes the author’s descriptions of the landscapes you’ll be travelling through, so you can follow along as you traverse the same challenging terrains the authors and their characters did.

See the full digital version here.

And if you fancy buying a copy of one of the books included in the map, check out the full literary list below.
Cheryl Strayed, Wild, 2012.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Cruise of the Rolling Junk, 1934.
Ted Conover, Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails With America’s Hoboes, 1984.
Peter Jenkins, A Walk Across America, 1979.
Robert Sullivan, Cross Country: Fifteen Years and 90,000 Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America with Lewis and Clark, 2006.
Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent, 1989.
William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways: A Journey into America, 1982.
Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957.
Mark Twain, Roughing It, 1872.
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974.
John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley, 1962.
Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 1968.
Love maps? This one shows you when we’re all going to die!

Since you are here, we would like to share our vision for the future of travel - and the direction Culture Trip is moving in.

Culture Trip launched in 2011 with a simple yet passionate mission: to inspire people to go beyond their boundaries and experience what makes a place, its people and its culture special and meaningful — and this is still in our DNA today. We are proud that, for more than a decade, millions like you have trusted our award-winning recommendations by people who deeply understand what makes certain places and communities so special.

Increasingly we believe the world needs more meaningful, real-life connections between curious travellers keen to explore the world in a more responsible way. That is why we have intensively curated a collection of premium small-group trips as an invitation to meet and connect with new, like-minded people for once-in-a-lifetime experiences in three categories: Culture Trips, Rail Trips and Private Trips. Our Trips are suitable for both solo travelers, couples and friends who want to explore the world together.

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