I’ve just gone on my own Big Road Trip, but it doesn’t compare to the others made famous in American literature. Over at Atlas Obscura, Richard Kreitner and Steven Melendez have collaborated to make an interactive map of many great road trips in American literature, ranging from Blue Highways to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (a book I really never liked) to The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (a book I loved). The journeys listed are in the lower right of the map below.
Here’s a screenshot of the map:
And what you can do with it (click on each journey, and then on the dots to see the specific reference to the place):
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.
Of all these journeys, my favorite by far is Kerouac’s On the Road, which had a profound effect on me in my twenties. Supposedly typed on a single sheet of adding-machine paper, largely in one go, it’s the story of Kerouac and his best pal, Neal Cassady, as they criss-crossed America (and even went down to Mexico) in search of nothing but pure experience. I haven’t reread it lately, but the abandonment of The American Dream in favor of wild perigrinations has stayed with me my whole life, even as I pursued an academic version of the American Dream. I did do road trips in my youth, hitchhiking across the U.S., and from time to time would leave the lab behind and travel to Nepal, India, and other remote locales, all in search of the experience denied me in academia.
Kerouac’s trip was by far the most extensive. Here’s a map of his and Neal’s wanderings, followed by one dot-click, so you can see how the map is interactive:
h/t: John S.
I came across this the other day. I’m just in awe of how detailed and thorough it is. So awesome! Thanks for sharing!
If you’re ever interested in some other great literary tidbits and musings, be sure to follow! Thanks!
So, is someone going to explain to us non Americans what the deal is with Arkansas? It’s conspicuously being avoided like the proverbial whatsit.
Arkansas? What’s that? Never heard of it.
Both Bill Clinton and Mike Huckabee have been governors thereof.
Usually votes GOP, except it voted for Clinton and Carter for Prez, so it’s higher priority is to vote GOB (Good Ol Boy).
Oh, just an attempt at a bit of sarcasm. I am from the US and know of Arkansas. I’ve even been through it a few times. Some nice country actually.
I have hiked 162 miles of the Ozark Highland Trail (that was all that was open at the time) and found it absolutely wonderful. Granted, I met only about 4 people in the 12 days I did it, until I got to the end and reentered civilization, but they were nice. It such a beautiful area and I’d recommend it to anyone. I saw my first black bears, nearly stepped on a rattlesnake, saw two others; great fun! and the halfway point of Ozone, of the trail a bit, has a nice little roadside burger place, worth stopping if you’ve ever in those parts, and have been hiking for 80 miles.
Maybe that’s what it is. Some road trips we would have heard of, except that the traveler stepped on a rattlesnake there.
I was quite literally in mid-step, boot hovering over the coiled snake, did a little mid-air hop, several quick steps…when my heart stopped trying to explode, I was able to laugh and enjoy the beauty of the sneaky bastard.
If they had included the Southern-dominated “Black Like Me” by John Howard Griffin, I believe they STILL would not have gotten Arkansas(!!)
Florida???
Now this is a keeper!!
I want to do this in a Tesla.
I also disliked Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Most of what it said about Western philosophy is wrong, and 100% of what it said about Zen was from either the writings of DT Suzuki or Alan Watts, kinda like getting all of your info about Islam from the poetry of Rumi. Buddhism as a weapon for bashing the West definitely falls under the tag of “Buddhists Behaving Badly”.
Before I looked at the explanation of inclusion criteria I was wondering about “Grapes of Wrath” and “Lolita” and I see that the cartographers anticipated me.
ZAAMM was almost required reading at the University of Chicago when I was there. It was published in 1974 – my first year in the College. The author, Robert Pirsig, was a graduate student at UofC in the 1950s. The Chairman character in the book was based on Richard McKeon. You can read about it here –
http://magazine.uchicago.edu/9412/Feat4.html
McKeon’s Wikipedia bio:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_McKeon
Pirsig’s Wikipedia bio:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._Pirsig
When I first read ZAAMM, I thought it had profound insights. I also thought Carlos Castaneda had profound insights. Hey I was 18. Taking LSD helped to cure me of my search for profound insights.
I also disliked Zen…I thought it was a load of pretentious rubbish. Still do.
Couldn’t get enough into it to tell if it had a point. Something to do with describing a road trip with the largest number of words possible for the smallest amount of content, and endless burbling about “quality”. I gave up after a day or so.
RE: “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (a book I really never liked)” I suppose I never, ever “liked” it because I never understood the point of the endless verbosity about seemingly nothing. I have an acquaintance physics professor who thinks that ZAMM has the answer to most of the world’s problems, and that answer seems to be something called “quality.” He gives extra credit for students in his introductory physics courses if they read the book. The “meaning” of it all must just be too deep for me to comprehend.
I also dislike Zen and motorcycle maintenance.
I’ve done a decent amount of cross the country traveling, but nothing on this scale of freedom and range. Though I have had quite a few memorable experiences on my road trips.
One example, my only experience of full on, mind bending hallucinations occurred during a solo cross country trip when I was in my early 20s. Nope, no drugs involved. First I drove 17 hours straight, which put me in Killeen TX. I slept a bit then drove straight thru from Killeen TX to Ventura CA. 27 hours stopping only for fuel and toilet. In the wee hours I got lost in the high desert to the north of LA. I was close to my destination, but lost, isolated with virtually no signs of civilization to be seen. Likely due to fatigue and anxiety I began experiencing the most amazing hallucinations that were so apparently real that I would react to them long before finally realizing that they weren’t real. For example, an enormous tree suddenly sprouting from the road directly in front of me, similar to time lapse photography. It was a wild experience. Like an idiot I just kept on going while my brain repeatedly detached from reality.
Neat. I am only vaguely familiar with Kerouac’s work, but recall Zen from childhood. I recall that Neil Peart went on a motorcycle ride and wrote about it…though partly through Canada.
Neil Peart the drummer of Rush?
I’m a bit of a Rush fan.
On the Road is one of my all time favorite books. For the 50th anniversary, Viking published On the Road, The original Scroll. I bought it, but haven’t read it yet.
A bit of description off the jacket:
The original version is rougher, wilder, and more sexually explicit than the published novel. Kerouac also uses the real names of his friends, including Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, and this adds to the text’s powerful and intimate immediacy.
I am glad to see my favourite was included, The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson. He’s got a rather vicious sense of humour.
I’m always surprised and saddened to find so few people who’ve ever read him. Intelligent, witty, charming (everything I lack), his books are so delightfully readable. I picked him up by accident, in audiobook form at first, just looking for something to occupy my head while trekking back and forth between KC and Warrensburg Mo as a commuting, non-traditional student. It was one of those “where have you been all my life” moments. I even read some of his stuff as bedtime stories to my son when he was younger.
I’ll have to add The Lost Continent to my list. I’m a big fan, perhaps because of the British/American insight he brings to his travel books. I remember finding a passage from Neither Here Not There so funny during a train journey that I had to put the book down with tears streaming down my face, as fellow passengers edged nervously away.
The pattern seems to follow the main Interstate Highways from east to west. I-80, I-70, I-10, I-40 or what was route 66. Even in California the main line is I-5, not exactly the route I would pick. But anyway, that is the answer to the question…what about Arkansas. The main east/west highways don’t go thru the state.
The Wiki tells me that the scroll was made of tracing sheets, taped together, typed margin-to-margin with no paragraph breaks (Kerouac,an early environmentalist in the reduce tradition).
It is currently owned by the team owner of the Inidanapolis Colts who paid a mere $2.43 m for it in 2001). The Wiki entry notes that it is occasionally loaned and includes a photograph of the scroll on display in 2007.
Very cool. Got to dig into that site!
I know I read On the Road when I was 20, and yeah, it had an impact on me then, but that wore off quickly. I got to the point where I could not bare to read it or anything else he wrote ever again.
More important to me has been Steinbeck’s Travels With Charlie. I’ve never stopped being rather fond of Steinbeck, even his lesser known works, though I never considered following in his footsteps. I would follow in Twain’s wake, travel down the the river as he did in LIfe on the Mississippi, and dearly wish to follow Bryson on the Appalachian Trail, though finish it unlike he and Katz, but I guess they don’t count since we’re so automobile-focused.
William Least-Heat Moon is another great road tripper whose travels would be nice to retrace as well. I’ve done parts of his Flint Hills, Ks ramble but that’s about it.
Travels with Charlie is one of my favorites.
(Redmond O’Hanlon is a wonderful travel writer who, kind of like Bill Bryson, always seems to take totally inappropriate and incompetent travel companions along. Much fun ensues.)
oh, never heard of O’Hanlon. will have to remember to give a look.
a non-American travel book I love is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. Not a Bryson-style comedy of errors, but enjoyable for other reasons. Anyone else read it?
CONGO JOURNEY
IN TROUBLE AGAIN
The O’Hanlons I’ve read. There are a couple of others. He’s a naturalist, so knows that stuff, but is also very articulate (Oxbridge, I believe) and FUNNY! I remember a great part about not peeing in the water because of the miniature catfish (can’t remember the name) in the Amazon which swim up one’s urethra…
candiru is the pee-seeking mini-fish, I believe
Is the best Canadian ‘road’ book, The Incredible Journey?!