I love books. I love maps. And I love learning about new places and people. So discovering this website, The American Experience in 737 Novels, was fantastic for me!

From the article the author wrote about her project: “At the end of this January, having heard the nation reduced to primary colors and simplistic nicknames—Red and Blue, Flyover and Rust Belt and Coastal Elite, one Friday I printed out a blank map of the United States and on the top printed Urgent Please Read: a joke. The Leader of the Free World was proud of not reading, I heard, and libraries and art were a waste of funds. Any story can be contained in 140 characters. Not fictional characters, I thought.

Flannery O’Connor spoke to me, she who went back to her home, as I had. The best American fiction has always been regional. That kind of fiction had saved my life. I began to print titles, tiny letters, onto the states I had learned through reading: Betsy-Tacy, Little Women, Sounder, Island of Blue Dolphins, Sula, Ceremony, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The latter title truly altered me as a child, when Francie takes her library books and climbs onto the fire escape, a wrought-iron structure I had to imagine.”