Check Out this Interactive Map of America’s Most Epic Literary Road Trips

Whether you’re planning your own adventure or just looking for a little literary escape to combat cabin fever, it’s always great to learn the tales of those who have gone before you.    Travel site Atlas Obscura has published an “obsessively detailed” map of great literary road trips across North America. 

The author, Richard Kreitner, describes it as such: 

The above 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. It 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

Most interestingly of all, for me at least, you can ruminate about what those differences say about American travel, American writing, American history.

It’s a fun click-around, and guaranteed to fill up your library reserve list. Hit it: The Obsessively Detailed Map of American Literature’s Most Epic Road Trips