1,001 Novels: A Library of America is a brilliant interactive literary map of the United States. The project maps more than 1,000 works of fiction and sets them based on the geographical “heart” of each story.

1,001 Novels: A Library of America is a labor of  love created by Susan Straight, an author and professor of creative writing at UC Riverside. Over the course of five years, Straight read and mapped 1,001 novels set in the United States. The resulting interactive map allows the user to explore American novels by region, plot, and theme.

Straight’s goal in mapping over one thousand American novels was to “tell the story of America through its literature.” She believes that novels can provide a unique window into the lives of people from different parts of the country and different eras. By mapping the novels, Straight also hoped to create a tool that can help readers discover new books and learn more about the history and culture of the United States.