Over the past five years, I have read and reread 1,001 volumes of fiction in a project to create a literary map of the country. This “American Library” idea came to him in 2016. At the time, news and elections were reporting that the country was irrevocably divided by politics, red and blue ideas, and debates over who was American and who was non-American.

To me, those debates are about the vast geography of our stories and novels, how people look for belonging, whether to leave or stay home, and how many places every state really is. was ignoring These discussions also ignored the common dreams, fears, challenges, hopes and everyday experiences that unite us regardless of where we live. I wanted to show that fictional places in America cannot be divided into blue states and red states.

Believe it or not, the house was packed with 1,001 books in the process of creating this map. There is also a 19th-century version of him with a cloth binding. Some were published last month. I worked with the map company Esri to find specific geographic locations for each book, ideas for locations included in fiction. Because American literature celebrates literary regions such as urban neighborhoods, rural parishes, small towns, ranches and boroughs, riverbanks and deserts. Landscapes, bayous and frozen tundra at night, asphalt playgrounds and dense forests.

Like Scheherazade in “Arabian Nights” telling many stories to live, I set a goal of 1,001 books. Perhaps these books move us forward as we read about ourselves, where our parents are from, neighborhoods we don’t know, homes we lived in decades or hundreds of years ago, or houses new people built last year. increase.

Click on each point to see the novel set in that location. To see the entire Esri project, go to click here.

All the books in my orange farm are piled high like old bookstore movie sets. I see America through fiction.

Wisconsin’s “Driftless” in David Rose’s work is a timeless evocation of the backwaters that brought me west. There, two books set hundreds of years apart in Montana, James Welch’s “Fool’s Crow” and Stephen Graham Jones’ “The Only Good Indian”—I couldn’t sleep all night. bottom. Rereading Nebraska’s Willa Cather led me to Chris Harding Thornton’s Picard County Atlas, a beautiful echo of my hometown. In my California, the Central Valley of Helena Maria Vilamontes’ “Beneath Jesus’ Feet” is the Los Angeles of Héctor Tovar’s “The Tattooed Soldiers” and Gordon Lee Johnson’s “The Bird Songs Don’t Lie”. It is connected to the Para settlement of .

My geography obsession began when my parents took us (five at the time) to camp in Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon and Yosemite in a 1966 Ford Country Squire station wagon. rice field. I carried a map and diligently surveyed small dirt roads, streams and mountains. This year, I tried to find the heart of these books by highlighting trips and regions on paper maps of the country given to me by the Automobile Club.

I worked with Esri’s Story Maps team to paint across a paper map to see the regions appearing state by state in the novel. After all, 11 regions, was chosen for its mountain range backbone, shared coastline, and grassy expanse. To find the exact location that maps to each novel, I found references in the books themselves, read interviews with authors through decades of writing, and often (my favorite method) via email or Instagram. I reached out and asked where I felt. The center of their book may be in a particularly fictional location.

The idea to map the Hidden Kingdom came from former student and author Vanessa Hoare, who is familiar with the secret locations of China and California. After speaking last year, I was reminded of the first Hidden Kingdom story I wrote when I was 15, about the desert canyons of Anza Borrego.

Key geographies of America in books by some of my favorite contemporary authors feature characters who speak Spanish, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and more. They are filled with the language of the place, nothing just red or blue, just political, always divisive. Of course, this also applies to life. Every region of America is a mix of different stories that cannot be reduced to a single idea.

We live in a land like the Coachella Valley near my home where stories are told over thousands of years. I live in a state that was the Mexican Territory until his 1848. I grew up with school children whose families arrived in what would become Riverside County in 1842. My hope is that this map will help other readers imagine all the kingdoms and characters in America. Live there, in the center of this country.

Here are the 11 kingdoms that filled my imagination on this journey.

Pointed firs, granite coves and revolutions
Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island
Stony shores and harbors of indigenous peoples and pilgrims, tales of yin and yang heritage in rock-lined fields, cobbled streets and onyx rivers, the novels of this region are classics, but I also have new voices. I love it. Each fall I visit my stepfather’s land, New Brunswick, then drive south to see New England through these wonderful books.

(Vintage Books, Pamela Dorman Books)

Empire State and Atlantic Shores
new york and new jersey
Boroughs and bridges, Finger Lakes and Adirondacks and the Jersey Shore, countless boulevards and cobbled literary districts, bridges and bays and, as the saying goes, millions of stories. The area is home to great novels told by famous characters around the world, but it’s also beloved for neighborhoods, history, and homes where blood and chosen family mean everything.

(Gray Wolf Press, Amistad)

Headlands and tides, shifting coasts and capitals
District of Columbia, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina
Through misty lowlands, forests, abandoned plantations and tobacco fields along the Intracoastal Waterway to the bays and sea islands of South Carolina and finally to the capital of the United States, a place to enjoy summer fireflies.

Mountain Home and Hollows, Smokies and Ozarks
Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania
This stretch of America, dominated by wooded spines and ridges and valleys, is a place of resilience, solitude, family, centuries-old secrets and people who are loved and loyal to this place. Unique stories come to life, including a brave journey to save the This kind of home implies a deep respect for tradition, but also a great novel for children who crave new visions.

(Dial Press, Ballantine Books)

Blues and Bayou, Delta and Coast
Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida
One of fiction’s richest legacies lies in eddies and waves, desperate fields and dark paths to freedom, centuries of tenacity, and the whirlpools of change brought about by courage. In the South, story is life, taken from the air into great literature.

(Plume, St Martin’s Griffin)

in the heart of the countryside
Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio
I take this title from William Gus. His rhythm repeats throughout this vast center where I have been told secret histories that mirror the great novels. As I walked along cornfields where blackbirds drifted endlessly above, and prairies turned into fields, into towns, into cities, my long-held heartache and sly humour swept this heartland. I thought it was colored.

(Penguin Classic, Vintage Book)

A High and Lonely Song: Meadows and Mountains
Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska
Every year I come here to hear tales of secrets from the people of my long-dead grandmother, from the Fraser Mountains to the desolate farmhouses in ghost towns like Purcell. These books draw the reader into the centuries of beauty, movement and painstaking work in this special place.

(Harper Perennial, William Morrow)

A big sky, a red earth, and a lonely star
Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas
Kansas May Live in Your Imagination Through Frank Baum’s ‘Wizard of Oz’ — The sky was filled with life swirling in tornadoes, and small wooden houses were lifted. Smoky Kansas women in 1873’s “Tie My Bones to Her Back,” set in Her Hill, “The Persian Pickle Club,” set in the 1930s Harveyville, and “The Virgin of Small Plains.” Our amazing stories may surprise you. The Republic of Texas is vast, but great literature comes from small towns like Seeley’s wonderful “Olympus, Texas,” Odessa’s dark “Valentine,” and Lubbock’s “Black Light.”

(Penguin Classics, Plume)

Enchanted Desert and Coyote Canyon
Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah
The Colorado, Rio Grande, Virgin, Salt, and Mojave rivers carve deep, serpentine canyons into this stunning land. Mesas and mountains tower into the sky, and indigenous peoples have built homes protected by cliffs and stones for thousands of years.

(Penguin Books, Harper Perennial)

Forests and Totems, Seas and Mountains: The Great Northwest
Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Idaho
A beloved Canadian-born stepfather and a small Swiss-born mother longed for the pristine coast and forests here, and took their five children to the trailer of a 1965 Holiday Rambler to see rain-silvered trees, ghosts, and more. We went through a beach like, a place full of salmon. river. But I know Alaska only through my imagination, someday’s dreams.

(Harper Perennial, Picador)

golden dreams and sapphire waves
california and hawaii
California To me, it’s not a coined word or cliché. It’s my hometown. As a child born here to parents who migrated from a snowy land, I wondered how I got to what people believed to be the Promised Land, what parts of other homes I brought back, and how. I grew up fascinated by the unique languages, foods, and legends.Hawaii is not an uncommon structure. In the woods and on the beach, people told me stories of chickens, old women, and ghosts.

Susan Straight is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. Her latest novel is “Mecca”.