Friday, July 24, 2015

Ripped from the pages of literature, interactive map charts roads trips from 12 books

There's still time this summer to hit the highways and see America. For those looking for a grand adventure straight from the pages of some of literature's most beloved tales, the folks at Atlas Osbscura have created an interactive map that details road trips from 12 popular novels and memoirs.

"I am a freak for the American road trip. And I'm not alone, as some of this country's best writers have taken a shot at describing that quintessentially American experience," writes Richard Kreitner, who researched the routes, while Steven Melendez created the map. The map "includes every place-name reference in 12 books about cross-country travel, from Mark Twain’s "Roughing It" (1872) to Cheryl Strayed’s "Wild" (2012), and maps the authors’ routes on top of one another. You can track an individual writer’s descriptions of the landscape as they traveled across it, or you can zoom in to see how different authors have written about the same place at different times." (For a larger version, click here)

1 comment:

Al Cross said...

No such book can be complete without the first great literary road trip, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, by the great naturalist John Muir about his trip in the late 1860s.