Friday Eye Candy: Mapping the Most Epic Road Trips in American Literature

Richard Kreitner shares news of a map of "American literature's most epic road trips," as created by Steven Melendez.

According to Kreitner, 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."

In the article accompanying the map, Kreitner explains how the books contributing to the map were selected and provides a brief intro to each of the books. And who knows, maybe long road trips are contributing to the recent increase in driving among Americans—not, say, trips to the grocery store.