This custom Google Map outlines the road trips of American literature

If you didn’t know, it’s actually not that hard to take Google’s mapping software and make your own custom maps. That’s what Steven Melendez did, outlining all of the most famous road trips from American literature on a beautiful digital map for you to peruse…

As per Atlas Obscura:

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.

Be sure to head over and check it out. Books that made to cut include Wild by Cheryl Strayed, The Cruise of the Rolling Junk by F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins, The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson, Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck and more.