This Land is Your Land: 13 Literary Pit Stops Across the USA

In 1969, three young women are on the cusp adulthood, but their life stories unfold quite differently than they had planned. SOMEWHERE OFF THE COAST OF MAINE is their journey—the dreams and the choices they make when they are young, and the changes brought about by the passing of time.

Set in small town Brewster, New York, in 1968, this novel tells the story of two boys who find solace in their close friendship as they confront feelings of powerlessness, navigate hardships at home, and dream of an escape from their dead-end town.

Hoping for a fresh start, fourteen-year-old Frankie Ross and her parents move to the booming mill town of Rock Harbor, Massachusetts, on the eve of World War I. This unforgettable coming-of-age story of family, love, and loss is told against the backdrop of a dramatic era of American history.

Benji Cooper is one of the few black students at his elite Manhattan prep school. But every summer, Benji escapes to Sag Harbor, where a small community of African American professionals have built a world of their own in the Hamptons. And although he’s just as confused about this all-black refuge as he is about the white world he negotiates the rest of the year, he thinks that the summer of ’85 might be one for the ages.

In this moving collection of interrelated stories, Ohio-born Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) illuminates the loneliness and frustration—spiritual, emotional, and artistic—of life in a small American town.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning and bestselling author of THE SHIPPING NEWS and ACCORDION CRIMES comes one of the most celebrated short-story collections of our time. Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in these breathtaking tales of loneliness, violence, and the wrong kinds of love.

When the body of a missing teenage girl washes up on the shore of a Minnesota island in Lake Superior, the residents of the nearby Bad Bluff reservation whisper that it was the work of the deadly mythical beast, the Windigo. Private investigator Cork O’Connor has taken on the case to determine how to save another missing girl, before it’s too late.

As a young man, Joe Blair was determined that he would never settle down. Fifteen years later, he finds himself working as a repairman in Iowa and spending his free time taxiing his children. When the Iowa River floods, transforming the town’s streets into a terrible and beautiful sea, Joe begins to question the path that led him to this place.

Comic, tragic, tender, and outlandish, CRAZY IN ALABAMA is the story of two journeys that converge in the deep south in 1965. Twelve-year-old Peejoe spends the summer at his grandmother’s where he witnesses violent racial conflict firsthand. Meanwhile, his aunt Lucille murders her husband, drops her six kids at her mother’s house, where Peejoe is staying, and heads to Los Angeles to audition for “The Beverly Hillbillies.”

When twelve-year-old David’s uncle Frank—a war hero and respected doctor—is accused of molesting his female Indian patients in the summer of 1948, David is forced to make the impossible choice between family loyalty and justice.

This cult classic of gonzo journalism is the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest, most drug-soaked, and addlebrained journeys ever undertaken.

The sunshine state lies in darkness, Los Angeles in ruins. This gripping and provocative debut novel imagines a frighteningly realistic near future, in which clashes between mankind’s dark nature and irrepressible resilience force us to question how far we will go to protect the ones we love.

At once a majestic journey, a significant work of history, and a moving personal saga, this is the journey of a lifetime: an epic quest to travel the length of the Oregon Trail the old-fashioned way, in a covered wagon with a team of mules. A wildly ambitious work of nonfiction, it is a book with a heart as big as the country it crosses.