On the road: mapping the great road trips of American literature

Richard Kreitner and Steven Melendez have created a comprehensive, interactive map that plots every location visited by a dozen authors during their famous expeditions across the US

More than 1,500 locations are charted by the interactive map. Photograph: Altas Obscura

Marta Bausells

Friday 31 July 2015  -0 The Guardian

Cheryl Strayed killed time at a small casino adjoining a Reno bus station at 4am, pack still strapped to her back; Jack Kerouac went down the mountain between Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Benson, Arizona, “with the clutch in and the motor off to save gas”; Bill Bryson drove through a landscape of gumdrop hills in Virginia, with a sky “full of those big fluffy clouds you always see in nautical paintings”, and came across towns with names including Snowflake, Horse Pasture and Charity.

Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild was adapted in to a film starring Reese Witherspoon. Photograph: DDP USA/Rex Shutterstock

These are just a handful of the more than 1,500 locations charted in a comprehensive and interactive map of American literature’s most iconic journeys, created by self-declared “freak for the American road trip” Richard Kreitner, in collaboration with developer Steven Melendez, and hosted online by Atlas Obscura.

“We’re at a time where so many Americans will go to see south-east Asia before Kentucky or Arkansas. That’s a real shame,” says Kreitner. He has charted every location mentioned in 12 books after travelling around the country himself and “obsessively reading” many of the classics. He then spent the last year reading and rereading on the subway, manually compiling each of the entries

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