Mapped
Cannery Row
John Steinbeck
A few hundred yards of the Monterey waterfront during the Depression, when the street was a run of sardine canneries, flophouses and grocery stores between the bay and the hill. Steinbeck maps his real neighbours onto invented names: Doc's Western Biological is Ed Ricketts's Pacific Biological Laboratories, still standing on the street now named Cannery Row; Lee Chong's grocery, the Palace Flophouse and Dora's Bear Flag are drawn from the shops and houses of ill repute that really lined it. The tide pools where Doc collects run out to the tip of the peninsula at Point Pinos.
6 places →
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
Steinbeck follows one Dust Bowl family the whole length of Route 66. Driven off their land near Sallisaw in eastern Oklahoma, the Joads load a truck and drive west through Oklahoma City, the panhandle and the desert, across the Colorado River at Needles, over the mountains and down into the California Central Valley, where the promised work turns out to be hunger and hostility. The map is that migration, a real highway from Oklahoma to a government camp near Bakersfield.
5 places →