SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Just in time for a summer road trip, Atlas Obscura, the collaborative exploration website, has laid out a map of a dozen of the famous road trips in American literature. They include Mark Twain going West in a stagecoach and roughing it. He winds up in Hawaii. How did the stagecoach get there? F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald driving from Connecticut to Alabama in an old auto he christened Rolling Junk in a series of articles for Motor magazine. Fitzgerald didn't only write about the rich and spoiled - an aging writer, his poodle named Charley and a truck named Rosinante driving in an oval across the country in John Steinbeck's "Travels with Charley." And Bill Bryson, an Iowan who became a Britain, ticking off countless American small towns in "The Lost Continent," in which he writes of their curious and interesting names, Snowflake, Fancy Gap, Horse Pasture, Meadows of Dan, Charity. The map provides a kind of music just in the names. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.