Someone Has Made An Interactive Map of Famous American Road Trips In Literature

The tradition of the Great American Road Trip has long been used in books and films to show normal boring people what it’s like to leave everything behind, achieve self actualisation through travel, and eat a lot of pancakes at roadside diners. Now a dude called Richard Kreitner has created an interactive map tracking every location reference in twelve of famous cross-country travel novels.

It’s exactly as nerdy as it sounds, and it is awesome.

Featuring recent books like Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and classics like Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the map includes excerpts from the author’s descriptions of the cities and towns, and allows you to see who was writing about what place at the same time. With help from map-maker Steven Melendez, Kreitner painstakingly hand typed all of the 1500 quotes from the books. “Some were difficult to track down,” Kreitner writes in his intro. “I beg forbearance if you, a hermit in the mountains of Wyoming, find that I have pinned Mark Twain’s reference to Horse Creek in a place where it could not have been, or if you, a denizen of what Tom Wolfe rather unkindly called ‘the Rat lands’ of Mexico, find my estimation of the precise location of Chicalote, Aguascalientes, somewhat inexact.”

For book geeks, this is a pretty nifty guide. Similarly if you’re looking to impress your Tindr date next week, the map is worth checking out.

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Head to The Obsessively Detailed Map Of American Literature’s Most Epic Road Trips here.