Literary Maps: Real Maps for Imaginary Places

The novelist started with a map.

His name was Robert Louis Stevenson, it was 1881 and he was playing a game with his stepson when he sketched out an idea.

“I made the map of an island; it was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully colored; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbors that pleased me like sonnets; and, with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance ‘Treasure Island,’ ” he wrote years later. “… The next thing I knew, I had some papers before me and was writing out a list of chapters.”

“Treasure Island,” the adventurous story of a boy, gnarly pirates and a treasure map, would become one of the most influential novels of the era. Stevenson’s sketch has become one of the most famous literary maps in world literature.

The Library preserves a first edition of Stevenson’s classic, along with dozens of other famous examples that have created a unique subset of the literary imagination over the centuries. There are so many that in 1999 the Library published “Language of the Land: The Library of Congress Book of Literary Maps” as a companion volume to the exhibition “Language of the Land: Journeys into Literary America.” Both drew on some of the 230 literary maps held in the Geography and Map Division.

After all, what would “The Lord of the Rings” be without its map of Middle-earth? If 18th-century readers of “Gulliver’s Travels” didn’t have a map to go along with Jonathan Swift’s satirical prose, how would they know where the fictional island of Lilliput — with its diminutive citizens — could be found? What sense could kids have made of “The Phantom Tollbooth” without legendary artist Jules Feiffer’s map of The Lands Beyond?

Here on a table in the soft light of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division is a first edition of William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” with a foldout map of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, the setting for most of the Nobel laureate’s work. Faulkner sketched it out himself. Just to the east of the “Pine Hills” area and just north of the squiggly river that gives the place its name, he wrote, “William Faulkner, sole owner and proprietor.”

There’s also a brisk post-publication demand for maps that show readers where authors lived and worked, or the places in which their characters came to life. This begins with the foundations of Western literature — Odysseus’ epic 10-year trip home after the Trojan War — and continues today, more than 2,700 years later.Name a famous fictional work and there’s a map showing you the highlights — Count Dracula came this way, Mrs. Dalloway went shopping here, the Buendia family lived there, James Bond got in trouble in all these places.

This appeal isn’t hard to understand, says bestselling novelist Ace Atkins, who will receive the 2026 Harper Lee Award next year in his home state of Alabama.

Two decades ago, when he settled in Oxford, Mississippi, not far from Faulkner’s home, he had an idea for a series of books set in a fictional Mississippi county, similar to Faulkner’s. So, before he wrote a word of what turned out to be an 11-book series, he got a ruler, a manila folder, a glass of bourbon and started drawing a map of his new creation. Streets, stores, woods, the whole shebang. He included several shoutouts to Faulkner characters so readers would understand the homage.

“That’s the fun of it, just having a county like that and developing new rivers and creeks and places where events happened,” he said. “That map became much more alive as I continued to write the books.”

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