American literature, charted in one monumental map

From Stephen King’s Maine to Steinbeck’s California, Big Think’s “A Literary Map of the United States” charts the stories that changed how we see a nation.

by Frank Jacobs, July 24, 2026

A literary map of the United States showing states, major cities, and regions, each labeled with notable authors and literary references from those areas.

Big Think’s second poster with Pop Chart is “A Literary Map of the United States,” which highlights the real and imagined settings of hundreds of books. There are many ways to read the map, including as an examination of “authorial inscription,” the overwriting of a place’s prior identity with a writer’s vision of it. From Cannery Row to Sleepy Hollow, here are 11 places that we can’t help but see through the eyes of authors.

A geography column on history and society.

The second map ever featured on Strange Maps — back in 2006, when it was still a fledgling WordPress blog — was a literary take on Maine. It showed the real and imagined places that tether Stephen King’s horror stories to the rugged landscape of his home state. On the map, fictional towns like Derry, Castle Rock, and Lake Kashwakamak jostle for space with the real ones that inspired them, including Bangor, Skowhegan, and Portland.

I was mesmerized by both that duality — the tension between actual and made-up locations — and another: the friction between literature as the projector and landscape as the screen upon which its narratives play out.

That tension — that friction — is the weird interzone where our imagination lives. It is where literary fiction comes alive and hooks us, where we walk for miles in the shoes of its protagonists, where they take us on emotional rollercoasters. The impact of some books long outlasts the final page. Drive through any quaint small town in Maine, and if you’ve read King, you can’t help but feel a nameless dread lurking behind the picturesque, all-too-familiar facades. Or perhaps in the storm drains underneath.

Have the author’s stories grafted a now-endemic eeriness onto the Pine Tree State, or have they merely brought a pre-existing spookiness to our attention? Either way, the phenomenon reveals the powerful effect of literature on our understanding of geography.

“A Literary Map of the United States,” a poster created by Ben Gibson, a design director at Big Think, charts that fascinating relationship between the word and the land on a nationwide level. Stephen King is still there — not just up in Maine (with It, Carrie, and ‘Salem’s Lot), but also in Colorado (The Shining, Misery) and Florida (Duma Key). But so are hundreds of other writers, their works anchored in various ways to other parts of the country.

A vibrant literary map of the United States highlights influential authors and notable literary works associated with each state, including Alaska and Hawaii. Enlarged insets showcase major metropolitan areas for added detail.

There are many ways to read this map: as a peculiar road map of the United States, a potted history of the same, a metatext of American literature, a guide to American literary genres and their centers of gravity, and more. I will get to at least some of them later, but for now, I want to examine the effect that scholars call broadly “imaginative geography,” more precisely “toponymic capture,” and more elegantly “authorial inscription.” It is the process by which a writer’s vision of a place becomes so dominant that it effectively overwrites that place’s prior identity in the public imagination.

We could say other parts of America have been “colonized” by other texts the same way King’s horror stories have influenced our perception of Maine. A gentler metaphor, from Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City, is of cultural and literary memory as an “overlay.” It resides above physical geography like a transparency on an overhead projector, a slightly shifting but persistent presence.

In Landmarks, the English nature writer Robert Macfarlane develops the idea that a sufficiently powerful text doesn’t just describe a landscape, but alters the mind that subsequently encounters it. He uses the verb phrase “to see through” to define it: you see the Suffolk coast through W.G. Sebald, the Mississippi through Mark Twain, the South (as a particularly “Gothic” place) through Faulkner.

Several such places — literary locations, real and imagined, that have lodged themselves firmly in the mind — stand out on Gibson’s map. The places below have been toponymically captured (or authorially inscribed) to such a degree that it has become all but impossible to think of them in any way except through the works of fiction that brought them to our attention.