The most famous book set in every state
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When a local attorney is asked to defend an African American man accused of rape, he has to decide between doing what’s right and doing what society expects of him, launching his children right in the middle of the conflict.
This Pulitzer Prize winner is set in Maycomb, a community divided by racism and inspired by Lee’s hometown of Monroeville.
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Christopher McCandless, a young man from a family of money, donates all of his savings to charity and abandons his possessions before hitchhiking into the Alaskan wilderness to reinvent himself.
This true-story survival-drama was made into a movie of the same name in 2007, directed by Sean Penn and starring Emile Hirsch, shedding light on McCandless’ idealism of a life unburdened by material possessions and the harsh realities of the Alaskan wild.
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Taylor is well on her way to escaping small-town life. But shortly into her journey to Tucson, Arizona, where she hopes to start over, a stranger leaves her with a Native American toddler with a traumatic past.
Kingsolver’s story of finding salvation in a barren situation is packed with real places and events.
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Luke Chandler lives on a cotton farm with his parents and grandparents and suddenly finds himself keeping the deadly secrets of harvest workers. The legal-thriller follows the 7-year-old as he grows up and loses his innocence in the 1950s.
The narrator’s upbringing in rural Arkansas inspired this coming-of-age tale.
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Joan Didion’s 1970 novel established her as a master fiction writer in addition to an already acclaimed nonfiction one. Set in Nevada, New York, and Hollywood, it’s “an indictment of Hollywood culture” in the 1960s and utterly gripping in its intensity. Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, adapted the book into a movie in 1972.
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A recovering alcoholic writer accepts a position as winter caretaker of the isolated Overlook Hotel, which sits in the Colorado Rockies. He moves in with his family, including 5-year-old son Danny, who has psychic abilities and begins to witness aspects of the hotel’s horrific past.
The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, which inspired the fictional Overlook, offers a Ghost Adventure Package for guests.
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Considered the original anti-suburban novel, “Revolutionary Road” follows a young, bright couple marooned in Connecticut and trying to escape pressure to conform in the 1950s. Their failed attempts to be different lead to self-destructive affairs and a psychotic breakdown.
In 2008, the book was adapted into a movie of the same name starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.
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Seven years after settling in Wilmington, an Italian couple is still in pursuit of the American Dream. Maddalena sews at a factory, but desperately wants to be a mother, while her husband’s nighttime escapades threaten to unravel all their hard work.
Castellani wove bits of his own family history into the book. His Italian father, who emigrated to Wilmington after World War II, dreamed of opening a restaurant in Wilmington’s Little Italy neighborhood just like Maddalena’s husband did.
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A classic work of African-American literature, “Their Eyes Were Watching God” is about Janie Crawford, a woman living in the town of Eaton, Florida.
Hurston was one of the most prominent writers of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s, publishing the novel in 1937. But she slipped into obscurity in the later years of her life, and “Eyes” went out of print until Alice Walker championed her in the 1970s. Now, the book is taught in classrooms around the country.
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Mitchell’s 1936 classic love story, set in the South during the Civil War and its aftermath, introduced the world to Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. O’Hara, the young spoiled daughter of a plantation owner, and her rogue star-crossed lover are torn apart and reunited through the tragedies and comedies of the human existence.
Mitchell spent nine years writing her manuscript, and the ensuing, unwanted fame led her to vow she would never write again.
But the book has been criticized for its portrayal of slavery, for romanticizing the Confederacy, and for its inclusion of racist stereotypes. In 2023, a new edition of the book came with a warning from its UK publisher, Pan Macmillan, that “there may be hurtful or indeed harmful phrases and terminology that were prevalent at the time this novel was written,” The Telegraph reported.
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The first of Michener’s mammoth sagas, “Hawaii” tells the islands’ history, from its creation by volcanic activity to its evolving identity as the most recent of the 50 US states.
Michener sought to show how Hawaii harmonizes different cultures and races, as a template that would benefit the rest of the country. However, he and his wife, the daughter of Japanese immigrants, faced harsh discrimination while living there.
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Little to do with housekeeping, Robinson’s poetic story follows two orphaned girls who are cared for by eccentric female relatives in the fictional town of Fingerbone.
Robinson describes the town as “chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather.” This, and many other details in “Housekeeping,” conjure images of her own Idaho hometown of Sandpoint.
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The story of a Lithuanian immigrant employed in Chicago’s stockyards, where Sinclair worked undercover to research for the book, revealed the poverty, hopelessness, and unpleasant living and working conditions experienced by meatpacking laborers in the early 20th century.
The book’s graphic depictions of the slaughterhouse work caused a public uproar that contributed to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act six months after “The Jungle” was published.
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Written by a native Hoosier, the novel centers on characters struggling to preserve their status during the rapid industrialization between the Civil War and 20th century. The aristocratic Amberson family loses its prestige and wealth as “new money” tycoons take over.
Woodruff Place, Indianapolis’ earliest suburb, was the setting for Tarkington’s “The Magnificent Ambersons,” which Orson Welles later adapted as a movie.
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When an Iowa farmer decides to retire, he plans to divide his thousand acres of land among his three daughters. The youngest objects, setting off a chain of events that unleashes long-suppressed emotions and secrets. It’s a modern-day “King Lear.”
Smiley’s narrator describes the farm in Zebulon County as “paid for, no encumbrances, as flat and fertile, black, friable and exposed as any piece of land on the face of the earth,” like a lot of land in Iowa.
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There’s no place like the Great Kansas Plains.
Baum’s imaginative tale of Dorothy Gale from Kansas and her Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion friends was the best-selling children’s story of the 1900 Christmas season and spawned the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz.”
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Uncle Tom, a long-suffering enslaved person, is sold by the Shelby family and begins a journey that, for 19th-century readers, depicted the realities of slavery and endorsed the power of Christian love to overcome all obstacles.
Stowe based the abolitionist novel on the first-hand stories of former enslaved people in Kentucky, a slave state, while she lived across the Ohio River in Cincinnati. Its powerful condemnation of slavery fueled the human rights debate in the mid-19th century.
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“A Confederacy of Dunces” is one of the funniest American novels ever published. It’s hard to describe, but it’s basically about a 30-year-old man named Ignatius J. Reilly who lives with his mother in New Orleans. Reilly is educated and philosophically opposed to having a job, but has to confront reality when his mom makes him get one.
The story behind the novel is as famous as the novel itself. It was Toole’s first published novel, published 11 years after his death after being championed by his mother and the writer Walker Percy. It was released to instant acclaim, winning a rare posthumous Pulitzer Prize.
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Carrie, a shy high school girl raised by an unstable, Christian fundamentalist mother, discovers she has telekinetic powers. When her classmates falsely crown her prom queen in an elaborate effort to humiliate her, she enacts her supernatural revenge.
Stephen King is Maine’s biggest champion in literature, and “Carrie” takes place in the fictional town of Chamberlain.
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Another Baltimore-based novel by Tyler, “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant” tells how three siblings remember growing up with their perfectionist mother as she lies on her deathbed. The Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel examines how the siblings’ recollections vary drastically.
Tyler’s characters live in Charles Village, near her long-time residence.
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“Walden” is the product of transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau’s two-year retreat into the woods, an experiment in isolation, simple living, and self-reliance. By immersing himself in nature, he hoped to understand society more objectively.
Encompassing 61 acres, Walden Pond is the crown jewel of the greater Walden Woods ecosystem in Concord.
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“The Virgin Suicides” is a gripping tale of five beautiful yet eccentric sisters who all die by suicide in the same year in Gross Pointe, Michigan. It is written from the perspective of an anonymous group of boys who are observant, infatuated, and endlessly struggling to explain the tragedy.
Eugenides said he was inspired by the deterioration of the state’s auto industry and the “feeling of growing up in Detroit, in a city losing population, and in perpetual crisis.”
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“Main Street” reveals two sides of Minnesota: the thriving metropolis of Saint Paul, where the heroine is from, and the dried-up small town she moves to after much convincing from her new husband. The young woman falls victim to the narrow-mindedness and unimaginative nature of the townspeople.
The author used his birthplace of Sauk Centre as a mold for the fictionalized Gopher Prairie setting.
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“The Sound and the Fury” encapsulates the decline of the American South through the dysfunctional Compson family, who face financial ruin during the Roaring ’20s and lose the respect of the townspeople in Jefferson, Mississippi.
Many readers complained that the book’s stream of consciousness style was hard to follow. Faulkner’s advice was to “read it four times,” he told the Paris Review.
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This classic coming-of-age story set alongside the Mississippi River follows Tom Sawyer, a young boy who preoccupies himself with pulling pranks and impressing a girl — until he witnesses a murder. Tom and his companions run away to an island, but eventually return to take up treasure hunting.
Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which inspired the setting of “Tom Sawyer” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
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“A River Runs Through It” is the semi-autobiographical tale of everyday life in the west for two brothers who are the sons of a local pastor.
Set amidst the beautiful, wondrous landscape of Montana, the two boys — one dutiful and one rebellious — each grow up and discover themselves, turning, at times, to dark places, but always under the footfalls of their father.
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The reader meets Ántonia Shimerda through a written account from the narrator, Jim Burden, a young man who moves to the fictional town of Black Hawk, Nebraska, to live with his grandparents.
Through Jim’s lens of love and infatuation, Ántonia is brought to life as a young Bohemian girl with many trials and triumphs. The reader grows to know her and, simultaneously, the author as well, who wrote the novel from details of her own life in Nebraska.
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“Fear and Loathing” follows a journalist, Raoul Duke, and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, on a trip to Las Vegas to cover an event taking place there.
However, the two are preoccupied and saddened by what they perceive as the decline of 1960s American pop culture and begin experimenting with drugs. Much of the book is seen through their hallucinations and twisted realities, which are only fueled by the hyperreal surroundings of Sin City.
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Containing all the classic John Irving tropes — a bear, rape, body-building, and social privilege — “The Hotel New Hampshire” follows a peculiar family as they open hotels in New Hampshire, Vienna, and Maine.
The book evokes Irving’s upbringing in the back woods of New Hampshire.
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Based on Díaz’s own experiences as a Dominican immigrant who moved to New Jersey, the 10 short stories in “Drown” tell of the struggles the New Jersey immigrant community faces, from poverty to homesickness to the language barrier.
The outlook is often grim, but thanks to Díaz’s riveting and intoxicating narrative, we manage to see the characters’ unsentimental determination for a better life.
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The final book in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, “Cities of the Plain” is about a doomed romance in the American frontier between a man and a sex worker who runs afoul of a pimp.
The novel is set in New Mexico on the border of the United States and Mexico.
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“The Great Gatsby” tells the story of Jay Gatsby, a young, lovesick millionaire, through the eyes of his friend and next-door neighbor, Nick Carraway. The novel progresses as Gatsby tries to rekindle his love with Daisy Buchanan, Nick’s cousin.
Through Gatsby’s shady business dealings and his extravagant wealthy lifestyle on Long Island, Fitzgerald reveals a world in New York that is both terribly beautiful and terribly corrupt.
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This Sparks romance novel, made famous by its film adaptation starring Mandy Moore, shows the unlikely, blossoming love between two high school students from Beaufort: Landon Carter, a popular rebel, and Jamie Sullivan, a quiet bookworm.
While Landon tries to get closer to Jamie, she pushes him away, fearing that a secret will end things between them before it begins.
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A woman living on a North Dakota Indian reservation is attacked, but police have a hard time investigating the case when she is unwilling to discuss what transpired.
Her son takes matters into his own hands, recruiting his friends to find out what happened and bring justice to his family and tribe.
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In Foster Wallace’s slightly altered view of Ohio in 1990, we follow our heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, a telephone operator and secretary who juggles a job with barely any purpose, a relationship with her much-older boss, and the task of finding her decrepit grandmother.
The grandmother, along with 25 other residents of the Shaker Heights Nursing Home, has managed to disappear without a trace.
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“Paradise” chronicles tensions between the patriarchal, all-Black town of Ruby, which was founded by the descendants of free slaves intent on isolating themselves from the outside world, and a nearby community of five women, each seeking refuge from the past.
Morrison conceived the idea for “Paradise” after researching the all-Black towns in Oklahoma that formed when newly freed men left plantations under duress.
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Randle McMurphy barges into an Oregon mental institution one day and decides to rally the patients against the tyranny of Nurse Ratched. McMurphy stirs more trouble as he smuggles in women, alcohol, and other contraband, leading to an all-out war between him and the institution.
Told through the eyes of one of the patients, Kesey’s novel reveals bits of his own background. He previously worked as an orderly in a mental health ward.
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“The Lovely Bones” is a dark, gripping tale about Susie Salmon, a young girl who was brutally raped and murdered in the cornfields of Norristown. It’s told from her point of view after her death.
Looking down on her family from heaven, Susie watches as they come to terms with what happened to her and try to solve a case that, to police, seems to lead nowhere.
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Anna has always been her older sister Kate’s lifesaver. She’s undergone countless surgeries, transplants, and donations to help save her sick sister, but when doctors discover that Anna is now a match to be Kate’s bone marrow donor, Anna decides to sue for the right to control her own body.
Picoult shows the heartbreaking pull between freedom and family in this Rhode Island-set novel.
Find out more about this book here.
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Lily Owens is a young girl growing up in 1960s South Carolina with an abusive father and an African American nanny who serves as a surrogate mother. When her nanny ends up in jail for insulting some white men, Lily breaks her out and the two run away, seeking refuge among three eccentric bee-keeping sisters.
Monk Kidd injects some of her own Southern upbringing into this contemporary heartwarming novel.
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“A Long Way From Home” details Brokaw’s own “American pilgrimage,” from boyhood on the Missouri River into a career in broadcast journalism in the ’60s.
In Brokaw’s honest narrative, we see how much his life has been shaped by growing up in South Dakota and the historic events he lived through as a child and young adult.
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“A Death in the Family” is the only novel by the polymath writer James Agee. It’s a semiautobiographical book about the emotional reverberations in a family after a father dies in a car accident. Set in Knoxville, it lyrically captures the feelings of every character, from the inner mind of a child to the tragedy of a widow.
The novel was published posthumously, after Agee died of a heart attack at 45, and won the Pulitzer Prize. He was also an acclaimed screenwriter, critic, and journalist.
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Made famous by the film of the same name starring Javier Bardem, “No Country for Old Men” is Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece about a drug deal-gone-wrong on the Texas-Mexico border. The event left a group of men dead and $2 million in an abandoned truck.
Llewellyn Moss, who discovered the scene, takes the money and gets swept up in the illicit drug business.
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Ebershoff weaves a novel based on the life of Ann Eliza Young, one of the wives of Mormon leader Brigham Young, who escapes her oppressive husband and embarks on a mission to end polygamy. The tale is juxtaposed against a modern-day story, following a young Mormon man who was cast out of the church and is trying to re-enter to solve his father’s murder.
In this work of historical fiction, Ebershoff takes a critical look at polygamy through his side-by-side narratives.
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Tartt’s debut novel tells the story of six classics students at a fictional Vermont college and was a sensation when it was released in 1992. It’s narrated by Richard Papen, one of the students, who recounts the story of a murder that happened among them.
The story takes a classic whodunnit premise and situates it in an coming-of-age story as well as the intellectual world of classic literature.
“Forceful, cerebral and impeccably controlled, ‘The Secret History’ achieves just what Ms. Tartt seems to have set out to do: It marches with cool, classical inevitability toward its terrible conclusion,” Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times in her review of the novel.
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Jesse Aarons wants to be the fastest runner in his rural Virginia elementary school and almost realizes his dream until a new girl shows up and outruns everyone. This leads to an unlikely friendship between Jesse and the girl, Leslie, who together invent a magic wooded kingdom they call Terabithia.
The book is loosely based on events from Patterson’s own childhood, which she spent in the greater DC area.
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The small town of Forks, Washington, became famous as the setting for Meyer’s best-selling vampire book series.
Bella Swan moves from her mom’s house to live with her dad in Forks where she meets Edward Cullen, a quiet, handsome young man at her new high school. Edward usually keeps to himself, but he is drawn to Bella and can’t seem to stay away from her — for a shocking reason.
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In this story of espionage, conspiracies, and buried American secrets, “The Da Vinci Code” author Dan Brown has done it again.
Brown’s beloved character Robert Langdon returns, this time chasing down his mentor’s kidnapper in DC while trying to decode five puzzling symbols linked to the Free Masons.
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In Friendly, a young boy finds a puppy he names Shiloh in the hills behind his home. But Shiloh belongs to Judd, a scary town-drunk who beats the dog.
Now the boy, who’s made a friend in Shiloh, will do anything to save him.
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The classic characters Laura, Mary, and their family struggle to make a home for themselves in Ingalls Wilder’s beloved “Little House” children’s book series.
Based in part on Ingalls Wilder’s own journey around the Midwest, young Laura and Mary, along with their parents and baby sister Carrie, learn to survive the long winter, fend for themselves, and take care of each other in this true-to-life work.
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Kaufman wrote “The Laramie Project” as a play to recount the murder of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man who became the victim of an extreme hate crime in a quiet Wyoming town.
Shepard is remembered and honored from the perspective of family and friends as Kaufman takes a lens to the stubborn intolerance in society.
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