Mapped
A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole
Toole's New Orleans is a hot, cluttered comic stage: a medievalist crank in a hunting cap wages war on the modern world from his mother's shotgun house Uptown out to the department-store clock on Canal Street, the neon of Bourbon Street, the French Quarter where he peddles hot dogs, and a failing pants factory down by the river. The map runs from Uptown across the Central Business District and French Quarter to Bywater.
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A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara
Four college friends build their adult lives in New York across some thirty years, the story circling ever closer to Jude St Francis, a gifted litigator carrying a childhood of unspeakable harm. The map holds to Lower Manhattan: a first cramped apartment on Lispenard Street in TriBeCa, the SoHo loft on Greene Street that Jude and Willem come to share, the downtown courts and the square by NYU, with a weekend house upstate off to the north.
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Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner
Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County is drawn from the real Lafayette County, Mississippi, and its county seat, Jefferson, from Oxford, the town where Faulkner lived and is buried. This novel maps the rise and ruin of Thomas Sutpen: his plantation twelve miles out in the county, the town that watched him, and the graves he left. Much of the story is told and retold decades later, some of it from a cold room at Harvard, so the map runs from the courthouse square out into the county and once far north to Cambridge.
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Beloved
Toni Morrison
A house on the free side of the Ohio River, haunted by a mother's choice under slavery. The map runs from the Kentucky plantation of the past, across the river into Ohio, out to a house and a clearing on the northern edge of Cincinnati, and back to the downtown riverfront where the real case behind the novel unfolded.
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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.
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Cold Mountain
Charles Frazier
Near the end of the Civil War, a wounded Confederate deserter named Inman walks home across North Carolina to Cold Mountain, the real peak in the Shining Rock Wilderness of Haywood County, and to Ada, who is struggling to keep her dead father's farm at Black Cove alive with the help of the drifter Ruby. The mountain and its community are real; the farm is invented and set at its foot. Inman's long journey west, from a Confederate hospital in Raleigh across the rivers of the Piedmont, runs as a chain of scenes outside the home setting.
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Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather
Archbishop Latour's New Mexico Territory of the 1850s, from the plaza and the cathedral he raises at Santa Fé, out to the sky-city of Ácoma on its mesa, up to rebel Taos and down through Albuquerque. Cather names the real pueblos, towns and missions; the bbox spans northern New Mexico from Ácoma and Albuquerque up to Taos.
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Democracy
Henry Adams
Gilded-Age Washington seen from a hired house on Lafayette Square, across from the White House. Adams maps the real capital from the inside: the Senate gallery, the presidential reception, and the steamer excursion down the Potomac to Mount Vernon. He published anonymously and knew every one of these rooms.
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Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
The narrator's Harlem: a stretch of Lenox Avenue and 125th Street where he speaks for the Brotherhood, sees an old couple evicted onto the pavement, and is finally swept into a night of fire and looting. The arc runs from a Southern college and a downtown paint works into the heart of Harlem and down to the forgotten cellar where a man who feels unseen retreats underground.
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Little Women
Louisa May Alcott
The book never names the March sisters' town, but Alcott wrote it into her own: Concord, Massachusetts, and her family home on Lexington Road. The old brown March house is drawn from Orchard House, where Alcott lived and wrote and which is now a museum; the stately stone Laurence mansion next door is drawn from the real house over the hedge; and the country-like suburb, its groves and quiet streets, is the Concord of the Alcotts, Emerson and Thoreau. Amy's later tour of Nice and Switzerland is a real excursion abroad. It brings Louisa May Alcott into the atlas.
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McTeague
Frank Norris
Polk Street, block by block, above a dental parlour. Norris pins his people to specific corners of the 1890s city and the flats of the East Bay, most of it erased by the 1906 earthquake a few years after he wrote it. The story then flees south and east, out of the setting entirely, to end in Death Valley.
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Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides
Three generations of a Greek American family, told by Cal Stephanides, run from a burning city on the Aegean to the assembly lines and streets of Detroit. The map holds the east-side Greek quarter where the grandparents land, the boulevard where the city caught fire in 1967, and the quiet modernist house out in Grosse Pointe where the family finally lands.
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Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
Ishmael signs aboard the whaler Pequod out of Nantucket and is swept into Captain Ahab's monomaniac hunt for the white whale that took his leg, a voyage across the world's oceans toward annihilation. Melville roots the epic in the real whaling world of New England: the port of New Bedford where Ishmael meets Queequeg, the island of Nantucket where the Pequod sails, and the far Pacific grounds where the White Whale at last is found.
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On the Road
Jack Kerouac
The book that turned a continent into a route. A young writer and his restless friend cross and recross the United States by car, bus and thumb, from New York out to Denver, on to San Francisco and the Bay, down to New Orleans, and finally in a headlong plunge south to Mexico City. The map follows that coast-to-coast spine and the last leg over the border.
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
Fleeing his drunken father, the boy Huckleberry Finn rafts down the Mississippi with Jim, a man escaping slavery, and the great river carries them past feuding families, con men and the whole moral tangle of the antebellum South. Twain maps the real river: Huck's town on the Missouri bank, the island where he meets Jim, the raft drifting ever southward, the shore towns of the Duke and the Dauphin, and the Arkansas farm where the journey ends.
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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain
Twain renamed his boyhood Hannibal “St. Petersburg”, but built it exactly: the Mississippi bank, the cave, the graveyard on the hill, Cardiff Hill above the town. Hannibal has marked those spots for tourists ever since, which makes it a rare novel a reader can already walk. It brings Mark Twain and the Mississippi into the atlas.
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The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
Gilded Age Manhattan, where an address is a verdict. Wharton is exact about which streets are respectable and which are not: the shabby old opera house on Fourteenth Street, the chocolate-coloured brownstones, and the bold new houses creeping up towards the Park. Half of these buildings are gone.
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Michael Chabon
The golden-age comic-book New York of two young cousins who invent a superhero to fight a war America has not yet joined. The map runs from a publisher's office high in the Empire State Building out to the tenement streets of Brooklyn, the bohemian rooms of Greenwich Village and the fairgrounds of Flushing Meadows, with Josef's Prague and a wartime Antarctic base held as far frames.
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The Awakening
Kate Chopin
Two Louisianas, an hour and a century apart: the Creole summer colony on Grand Isle in the Gulf, and the Pontellier house on Esplanade back in New Orleans. Chopin named the real islands, streets, and church; the bbox spans the whole run from the barrier island north to the city.
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The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
Esther Greenwood spends a glittering, hollow month as a guest editor at a women's magazine in New York, staying at a women-only hotel and going through the motions of a life she cannot feel, before returning to her mother's house in the Boston suburbs and a breakdown. The New York half is closely mapped: the Amazon hotel is the real Barbizon, the magazine is Plath's own Mademoiselle, and the United Nations turns up on a date. The Massachusetts scenes of home and hospital run outside the setting.
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The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe
Wolfe's panorama of 1980s New York runs on the distance between its worlds. Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street bond trader who thinks of himself as a Master of the Universe, lives in a Park Avenue duplex and takes a wrong turn off the expressway into the South Bronx, where his mistress hits a young Black man with his car. The fallout pulls in the Bronx County Courthouse, a Harlem preacher, and the tabloids, and the map is the city's fault lines laid end to end.
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The Bostonians
Henry James
A novel of reform-era Boston, mapped to real ground. Olive Chancellor's house stands on the water side of Charles Street, on the flat of Beacon Hill, looking over the new-made Back Bay; the reformer Miss Birdseye holds her meeting out in the South End; Verena crosses to Cambridge and the great Memorial Hall at Harvard; and the climax comes at the Music Hall, the concert hall where she is to give her big address. Summer takes them to "Marmion" on the southern cape, James's name for the real village of Marion, Massachusetts. A run of scenes moves the fight to New York.
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The Catcher in the Rye
J. D. Salinger
Having got himself thrown out of yet another prep school, Holden Caulfield spends two lost days drifting around Manhattan before he has to face his parents. The city is precisely his: Grand Central where he sleeps on a bench, the frozen pond in Central Park where he keeps wondering where the ducks go, the unchanging dioramas at the Museum of Natural History, and the carousel where his sister Phoebe rides in the rain at the end.
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The Financier
Theodore Dreiser
Philadelphia and the making of a financier. Dreiser builds Frank Cowperwood's rise and ruin out of the real ledgers of the city: the banks and brokerages of Third Street, the trading floor of the exchange, the municipal offices in Independence Hall he corrupts, and the great gray penitentiary on Fairmount where he is jailed. It brings Philadelphia into the atlas.
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The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt
The novel is anchored in Manhattan, where a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum kills the narrator's mother and leaves him holding a small stolen Dutch painting. From the museum on Fifth Avenue the map runs down to the Park Avenue apartment that takes him in and to the antiques workshop in Greenwich Village that becomes his real home, before the story travels far out to Las Vegas and then to Amsterdam.
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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.
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The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The summer of 1922 on the North Shore of Long Island and in Manhattan. West Egg and East Egg are Fitzgerald's names for the real Great Neck (Kings Point) and Sands Point peninsulas, facing each other across Manhasset Bay. The valley of ashes is the Corona ash dumps in Queens, passed on the road and railway into the city under the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The Plaza is the Plaza.
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The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood
Atwood wrote the novel while at Harvard and set the Republic of Gilead in the real Cambridge she knew. The old university town keeps its shape, but its landmarks are put to a theocracy's uses: the campus becomes a walled compound, the library a secret-police headquarters, the brick wall along the avenue a gallows. The map runs from Harvard Square through the Yard to the banks of the Charles.
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The Help
Kathryn Stockett
Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s, told in the voices of two Black maids, Aibileen and Minny, and Skeeter, a young white woman who secretly collects their accounts of working in white households. The city is real and its divisions are geographic: the white families in the leafy streets of Belhaven, the maids' own neighbourhood over by Farish Street, the segregated downtown, and the Phelan cotton farm out past the edge of town.
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The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton
Lily Bart falls through New York one address at a time. The novel opens in the crowd at Grand Central and follows her down: the bachelor flats of the Benedick, the Trenors' great estate up the Hudson, the marble mansions creeping up Fifth Avenue, and, at the end, a milliner's workroom, a West Side boarding-house, and a bench in Bryant Park. The plot is a map, read downwards.
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The House of the Seven Gables
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The gabled house is real. It still stands on Turner Street by Salem harbour, the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion that Hawthorne knew and that is preserved today as the House of the Seven Gables museum. Around it the novel keeps its bearings in Salem: the little shop cut into the front gable, the garden and Maule's Well behind, the arched window over the by-street Hawthorne renames Pyncheon Street, and the railway on which Hepzibah and Clifford flee the town. The interiors are inferred to the real house, and Pyncheon Street is Hawthorne's name for a real Salem street, which is what the certainty labels are for.
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The Jungle
Upton Sinclair
A Lithuanian immigrant and his family come to Chicago for work and are ground down by the meatpacking industry. The map runs across the South Side: the real Union Stock Yards and the packinghouse district called Packingtown, the immigrant slum of Back of the Yards beside it, the dump and fertilizer works on its edge, and the downtown Loop where the ruined hero drifts at the end. Sinclair reported from the yards in 1904 before writing the book.
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The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett
Hammett worked the case out on a real city grid. Sam Spade's office looks down Sutter Street; his partner is shot in Burritt Alley, a real dead-end off Bush Street that now carries a plaque; he eats chops at John's Grill on Ellis Street, which still keeps a Falcon room upstairs; and the black bird itself comes ashore off a burning ship at the waterfront. The pursuit of the jewelled statuette runs a tight circuit of downtown San Francisco.
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The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Puritan Boston in the 1640s, most of it long gone: the scaffold in the market-place, the jail on Prison Lane, Governor Bellingham's glittering hall, and the forest at the edge of the peninsula. Almost every pin here is inferred to its documented site, which is exactly what the certainty labels are for. The frame, The Custom-House, is a real excursion north to Salem, where Hawthorne worked and where the building still stands.
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The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
The fall of the Compsons, an old Mississippi family, told four times over across three days in 1928 and one in 1910. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County is drawn from the real Lafayette County, and its town of Jefferson from Oxford, where he lived and is buried. The map grounds the invented county in that ground: the courthouse square, the Compson place, the pasture sold off to a golf course, the branch below it. Quentin's day belongs elsewhere, at Harvard and on the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, mapped as scenes outside the setting.
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
Janie Crawford's search for love and a self of her own carries her across Florida through three marriages: from her grandmother's cabin and a loveless farm in the west, to the all-Black town of Eatonville where she is the mayor's silenced wife, to the Everglades 'muck' by Lake Okeechobee where she finds joy with Tea Cake, until the great 1928 hurricane. Hurston roots her landmark of Black American literature in real places she knew, above all the self-governing town of Eatonville and the migrant bean fields of the Glades.
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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain
The mischievous boy Tom Sawyer roams a sleepy Mississippi river town through a summer of whitewashed fences, pirate games, buried treasure and a murder witnessed at midnight. Twain drew St Petersburg from his own Hannibal, Missouri, and maps its real world: the village and Aunt Polly's, the graveyard and the schoolhouse, Jackson's Island where the boys run wild, and the cave where Tom and Becky are lost and Injun Joe meets his end.
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Washington Square
Henry James
A single square, mapped to the door. James fixes the whole novel to a few blocks of Greenwich Village: Dr Sloper's wide-fronted house on Washington Square North, the real Row of Greek Revival houses that still stands; the Square itself, with its wooden paling and ailantus-trees; and the confident new Fifth Avenue taking its origin at the corner. Downtown, near the City Hall, is the old world the doctor left; uptown is the raw frontier fashion was chasing. A tour of Switzerland is the one excursion beyond the setting.
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