After years of pouring over books about American road trips, Atlas Obscura writer Richard Kreitner took on an absurd task: choosing a dozen of them, and then tracing their routes.
His process involved transcribing more than 1500 location-based excerpts of these books, and figuring out their coordinates as best he could. He then enlisted the help of Steven Melendez, who turned the whole thing into an interactive resource.
One of the best parts of the map is seeing the same parts of the country through the eyes of different authors at different points in history. For example, why just drive through Montana when you could drive through Montana via the elegant descriptions offered by Robert Sullivan, Robert M. Pirsig, and John Steinbeck?
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