Literature has the power to transport us to far away places in our minds – so why not in person?
Beloved books have sent fans flocking to the real-life settings of their favorite stories, sometimes elevating those locations to near mythological status. From Stephen King's Maine to Fitzgerald's Paris, some of the world's top travel destinations have literature to thank for their fanbase.
While you may not be able to book your trip anytime soon, you can enjoy a virtual tour from home and marvel at the real-life locations whose beauty has been immortalized on the page.
As a native of Durham, Maine, Stephen King has based his eerie fictional towns – Derry, Castle Rock, and Jerusalem's Lot – on Maine's New England aesthetic and haunted feel.
"Can an entire city be haunted? Haunted as some houses are supposed to be haunted? Not just a single building in that city, or the corner of a single street, or a single basketball court in a single pocket-park, the netless basket jutting out at sunset like some obscure and bloody instrument of torture, not just one area—but everything. The whole works. Can that be?" (IT)
"Home is the place where when you go there, you have to finally face the thing in the dark." (IT)
Literary Hub
The 1847 gothic novel isn't just a dramatic love story about two young forbidden lovers. The moors of Northern England where the novel is set play just as significant a role in the story's haunting emotional arc and deep resonance with millions of readers. They're just as breathtaking in real life. The Yorkshire Moors are even called Brontë Country in honor of the book's literary legacy.
"There was no moon, and everything beneath lay in misty darkness: not a light gleamed from any house, far or near all had been extinguished long ago: and those at Wuthering Heights were never visible [from Thrushcross Grange]—still she asserted she caught their shining."
Culture Trip
Of course, Hemingway adored Spain, with his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises featuring stark contrasts between commercial artifice of Paris and the natural beauty and energy of Pamplona. He was also famously fascinated by the Spanish tradition of bull-fighting after seeing the event for the first time in Pamplona.
"Pamplona is changed, of course, but not as much as we are older. I found that if you took a drink that it got very much the same as it always was." ― Ernest Hemingway.
Trip Advisor
The counterculture of the 1960s brought renowned Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs to Morocco, where they developed much of their irreverent, off beat style. Burroughs' Naked Lunch was inspired by Tangier and the bohemian local artists.
"In the City Market is the Meet Café. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excusers of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang-utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war... A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum... Larval entities waiting for a Live One..." (William Burroughs, Naked Lunch)
"The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American," Fitzgerald wrote. "It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older — intelligence and good manners."
Fangirl Quest
"It's a real place. A lot of people think I made it up, but I didn't," Gaiman said. "But what I did wind up doing in the book was tone it down a bit so people would believe it."
"I started leaving things out [of the novel]... like the hundred-person artificial orchestra and the giant carousel that's 50-foot-high on which ancient Victorian dolls just go round and round staring balefully," Gaiman continued. "I think I did mention the four horsemen of the apocalypse hanging from the ceiling in that room. But it's kind of impossible to describe and it [House on the Rock] does have the biggest carousel in the world. And you are not allowed to ride on the biggest carousel in the world... except they let me. And several years ago, they let Bryan. And the photographs of us on the biggest carousel show the happiest men in the world.
"You would think we might have outgrown going round and round on carousels, but we have not," Gaiman added.
Walden.org
Thoreau wasn't as isolated as people assume when he spent time at Walden Pond in the 1850s, but the New England lake left an indelible mark on his work.
"We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."
Nantucket
Melville had never actually visited Nantucket Island when he wrote his famous description of it in his 1851 classic Moby Dick, but his imagination sufficed:
"Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it — a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background."
"What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take to the sea for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and quohogs in the sand; grown bolder, they waded out with nets for mackerel; more experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured cod; and at last, launching a navy of great ships on the sea, explored this watery world; put an incessant belt of circumnavigations round it.. . . And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders."
National Geographic
For book lovers, James Joyce is simply synonymous with Dublin. "When I die Dublin will be written in my heart," he wrote in a letter. "A nation is the same people living in the same place. Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion."
ShermansTravel
Made famous by the major motion picture starring Reese Witherspoon, the memoir Wild inspired droves of readers to hike the Pacific Crest Trail described in Strayed's life-changing journey:
"It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B."
"It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way."
The Alaska Life
The Stampede Trail in Alaska is not a safe trail to hike. Anyone who's read Jon Krakauer's book about Christopher McCandless' trek to and eventual demise in Alaska knows this (along with anyone who saw the film adaptation). Yet hikers continually attempt to follow the path, sometimes with deadly consequences. While it is possible to follow the path and return safely, it takes experienced and highly prepared hikers to do so. Still, Alaska has many other beautiful and safe trails to hike, so perhaps enjoy the virtual tour of the Stampede Trail from your home.
"He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight."
Related Posts