Placing Literature Lets Your Map Scenes From Novels

by: Dianna Dilworth

Have you ever wandered around San Francisco and wondered where Sam Spade lived? A new website called Placing Literature combines maps with scenes from novels to place literary landmarks in real locations on maps.


The app launched last week and already has more more than 1,500 locations logged on the site including wilderness locations near Lake Tahoe where Samuel L. Clemens first wrote about Mark Twain and the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House in Massachusets, which was featured in Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

The maps are crowdsourced, so if you don’t see the literary connection that you are looking for, you can add to the growing database and map by logging into your Google account. You can add your favorite literary landmarks as well as locations from your own book. The app has the potential to be a fun tool for travel as well as for book club field trips.

from: MediaBistro