Travel the US without leaving home with these top 50 books for each state

Muscle Shoals Sound Studio: How the Swampers Changed American Music by Carla Jean Whitley
There are plenty of books you could read about 'Bama's history, but few so clearly demonstrate how the music coming out of Muscle Shoals put the Heart of Dixie on the map. Whitley charts the unlikely rise of the Swampers out of this little music studio on the Tennessee River to its hey day as the recording studio that's produced hits by the Rolling Stones Lynyrd Skynyrd and modern favorites like the Black Keys. Not only will you have a fascinating read by a bonafide Birmingham music writer, you'll likely end up with an epic soundtrack for your travels through the South.

Passage To Juneau: A Sea and Its Meaning by Jonathan Raban
National Book Award-winner Jonathan Raban manages to capture the vast multitudes contained by Alaska, and all it signifies, in this unique account of his voyage from Seattle to Juneau in a 35-foot sailboat. He blends history, geography, philosophy and seamanship into a narrative that travelers to Alaska will find illuminating, while also reflecting on the events in his personal life that inspired him to make such a journey— the sort that have inspired countless other travelers to turn to one of America's last frontiers for adventure and insight.

Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest by Andrew Needham 
How did Phoenix, Arizona, transform from the Old West outpost depicted in early 20th century classics like Zane Grey's Under the Tonto Rim to the sprawling sun belt metropolis we know today? That's the question Andrew Needham sets out to answer in this account of something as simple as electricity could rapidly transform a small town near the Navajo Reservation, and change the whole Southwest in the process.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
One of the most famous books to come out of The Natural State, the late, great Angelou's literary autobiography provides a rich sense of time and place, transporting the reader to pre-Civil Rights era rural Arkansas. An illuminating look at the geography of segregation and figurative boundaries faced by people of color in the Jim Crow south, Angelou's classic is a must-read for anyone, especially if your knowledge of Arkansas extends only as far as highway rest stops and the Clinton family.

California: A History by Kevin Starr
It's always a challenge to pick one book to sum up a whole state, but it's especially challenging when that state is as large and diverse as California, or when it looms as large in the cultural imagination as the Golden State. Kevin Starr's comprehensive history, however, provides key context from Baja California where Cortes first landed in 1535 (and is today a part of Mexico) to the city once known as Yerba Buena (but today is better known as San Francisco).

The book spans the period from when European colonists still thought California was part of the Indies and ruled by Amazonian queens to the legacy of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Does Starr manage to touch on every incident in California history? No, but this is as close as you can get while still squeezing it in your carry-on.

Centennial by James A. Michener
This classic Western epic covers one of the most exciting periods in Colorado history as only fiction can. But Michener roots his saga in a level of research and detail that belays the deep knowledge of real Coloradan geology, geography, hydrology, botany, history, and culture. His characters act as guides through the Centennial State of yesteryear, giving modern travelers a chance to explore this place as richly from page to page as they might from Denver to Durango.

On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Connecticut often brings to mind the preppy world portrayed in TV shows and movies like The Gilmore Girls and The Ice Storm, but 2019 MacArthur Fellow Ocean Vuong's debut novel reveals another side of this storied New England state. We Are Briefly Gorgeous invites readers to see Hartford from the perspective of Little Dog, the novel's queer Asian-American protagonist. Set in the 1990s at the blossoming of the opioid crisis, Vuong's prose is rich in place-based detail, from the worn corner stores of Franklin Avenue on the city's south end to the nail salons of the Hartford suburbs and beyond. 

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
Delaware might be the country's second-smallest state, with cities overshadowed by nearby Philadelphia and Baltimore, but it has an under-the-radar literary claim to fame as the setting for Fight Club. This cult-classic 1996 black comedy is more famous for the film version with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton than its setting. But read closely, and perhaps in proximity to Wilmington, and you'll start to notice the details that suggest the novel is actually set in zip code 19808. 

Florida by Lauren Groff
The Sunshine state is notoriously hard to sum up with such a dizzyingly rich ecology, melting pot of cultural influences, and constant influx of tourists and snowbirds. That's why Lauren Groff's short story collection stands a better chance of dropping readers into the multitudes that are Florida than any novel. Though the characters and their circumstances and perspectives vary, the one constant is Florida itself, in all of its swamps, sinkholes, and sticky magic – the place that Groff describes as "a damp, dense tangle. An Eden of dangerous things.”

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray
Few writers have the life experience, or the literary ability, to blend a childhood spent in a junkyard off Georgia's Highway 1 with environmentalism, lush descriptions of longleaf pines and orchids, and meditations on how change comes even to rural, religious southern Georgia. But that's exactly what Ray accomplishes in a book unlike any other, and which gives the reader sharply honed insight into a part of the world as unique as this author's prose.

Hawai‘i One Summer by Maxine Hong Kingston
Kingston spent seventeen years in Hawaii, and this volume captures glimpses of life in paradise on essay at a time. Her vignettes capture everyday life on the islands during the tumultuous 1970s and 80s, and touch on the complexities of Asian-American identity, indigenous history, surfing, and even quotidian chores. If you've enjoy traveling like a local, Kingston's work opens the door. 

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Though the town in the book is called Fingerbone, keen readers will see the similarities between Robinson's fictional setting and the real Sandpoint, Idaho. The timeless, transcendental quality of the novel feels like it could take place long ago or closer to the present. With beautiful descriptions of the remote land occupied by these female characters and the domestic spaces they cultivate, Housekeeping is a tactile work that makes the inland Pacific Northwest jump off the page.

Divine Days by Leon Forrest
Oft compared to James Joyce, if the Dublin of Uylesses were swapped for Chicago's South Side, Divine Days is a lesser-known chronicle of African American life in the Second City. Forrest's account of seven days in his protagonist isn't a short read by any means – the other novel it's often compared to is War and Peace – but it does give the reader and intimate look at the Black community in Chicago in the late 1960s.

We Are All Complete Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
It's the 1970s in Bloomington, and five year old Rosemary Cooke is the chatty daughter of an Indiana University psychology professor living a pretty ordinary midwestern life. That is, until Rosemary goes to visit her grandmother and returns home to find her twin sister Fern is missing – a loss that sends ripples through the community, her family, and her own capacity for relationships.

Even after she leaves Indiana for college in California, Rosemary struggles to process the past through new friendships, and a deep desire to mirror the world back at itself. The result is a curious, compelling novel – a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award – replete with imperfect doubles, reflected in a pair of very different college towns and a pair of mismatched sisters.

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
"At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on County Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road," explains Virginia Cook Smith in the first sentence of A Thousand Acres. But it turns out that it's harder to map a topography of a family, and the human heart, than the farm Virginia's father decides to divide between his three daughters. Sometimes described as King Lear mapped onto Zebulon County, Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is emotionally fraught, but rich in the details of small town midwestern life and a life tied to the land.

Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes' celebrated first novel, first published in 1930, takes place twenty years earlier in small town Kansas. Hughes draws on his own experiences in Lawrence around the same time and builds on the themes introduced in his earlier poetry collections, creating an honest portrait of Black midwestern life around the turn of the century that continues to challenge visions of the region as white and culturally bereft.

Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place by bell hooks
"Living in the Kentucky hills was where I first learned the importance of being wild," writes bell hooks in this luminous, poetic ode to her hometown of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. A glimpse at life for people of color in Appalachia, a meditation on the environment and identity, and a farewell to a place and time that no longer exists as it once did, hooks shines a light on hidden hollers as only she can.

A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld
Louisiana is such a striking and singular place it's no wonder that it's inspired a slew of memorable fiction, from Kate Chopin's The Awakening to Tennessee Williams' Streetcar Named Desire to John Kennedy O'Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces to Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire. 

Neufeld manages to do something utterly unique and unexpected, however, in this graphic novel that turns the accounts of seven different New Orleans residents before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina into a moving visual and written record that maps the city, its corner stores, its homes, and its heart.

The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier by Colin Woodard
Of course, you could always stick any number of Stephen King novels in your bag before heading off to Portland, Acadia, and Katahdin. But you'd miss out on what is essentially the colonial, East Coast version of The Deadliest Catch.

This rugged history stretches from the days when Maine was populated only by the Penobscot tribe, to the arrival of European settlers who predated the pilgrims, and on to the present day's changing economies and environments, and attitudes towards nature. Through the lens of lobster fishing, readers will gain new insight into a still-secluded place with a truly unique culture.

A Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Fans of Coates' meditation on race in America (and response to the work of James Baldwin) Between the World and Me will enjoy this lyrical, personal memoir on similar themes, firmly rooted in turbulent post-Vietnam War West Baltimore. And if you've never read Coates before, you'll enjoy this introduction to his unflinching, beautiful style that places the reader right in the midst of the author's childhood, from maps he sketches of Old Baltimore to the first sentence that sets the action on Charles Street to the halls of Howard College.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
A heavy book that will certainly take you longer to read than the length of your average vacation, and which is set in an alternate future, Wallace's Infinite Jest is nevertheless chock full of local details about Boston and its suburbs that will delight locals and visitors alike. In fact, there are so many place-based references in Wallace's work that a whole website, Infinite Boston, is dedicated to parsing them, complete with an interactive Infinite Atlas. 

Hunter's Moon by Philip Caputo
Michigan has proven ripe territory for men who work in vignettes and experienced the depravities of war – Hemingway got his start here with his Nick Adams stories and early work like "Big Two Hearted River." Philip Caputo takes his own, lighter approach, however, and fills his version of Michigan's picturesque Upper Peninsula with a cast of characters in these series of short stories that show he is as familiar with the male psyche as he is with the Wolverine State, putting his Pulitzer Prize–winning journalism chops well to use in fiction.

History of Wolves by Emily Friedland
This lovely, haunting debut from Emily Friedland suspends the reader in the remote, isolated Northwoods of Minnesota, where traversing the stands of sumac and pines on foot and slogging down snowy road shoulders is all in a day's routine. The novel charts the adolescent protagonist Madeline's unfurling adolescence against a backdrop of changing seasons, from crisp post-hole winters to summers on the lake thick with mosquitoes, and eventually follows Madeline as an adult into apartments and offices of Minneapolis, without losing focus on the mystery that's central to the novel.

Sing Unburied, Sing by Jessamine Ward
In the tradition of another quintessential Mississippi novel, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Jessamine Ward's characters set out on an epic road trip from the Magnolia State's Gulf Coast to Parchman Farm, the famous penitentiary to the northwest chronicled in many a Delta Blues song.

Like Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, in Sing, Unburied, Sing Ward returns to Bois Sauvage, a fictional town that has made appearances in her previous work and encapsulates much of real-life rural Mississippi life. But like many works in the Southern Gothic tradition, Sing, Unburied, Sing is deeply haunted by ghosts both literal and historical, carrying the reader through both the tangible deep South and one more ephemeral, but no less real.

Lake of the Ozarks: My Surreal Summers in a Vanishing America by Bill Geist
As a young boy, Bill Geist's aunt and uncle owned a motel in the heart of the Ozarks, the kind of bucolic 1960s vacation spot favored for summer family vacations not too far from home. Whether you remember escaping the heat of St. Louis for lake country as Geist describes, or it evokes similar getaways in your own neck of the woods, this book is big on nostalgia and the kind of details that immediately take you back to the kitsch and simplicity of small-town Missouri.

This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind by Ivan Doig
From the very first pages, Doig's memoir is carpeted in detail, from the "fir-dark flanks of Hatfield Mountain" to the way Sixteenmile Creek buries itself in a "willow-masked gulch." But it's more than a skilled author flexing his literary muscle – Doig shows how connection to the land is connection to the self for Montana's ranchers, a matter of survival, community and the human spirit.

It's Not the End of the Earth, but You Can See It from Here by Roger L. Welsch
Roger Welsch has dedicated much of his career as a scholar, folklorist, writer and CBS correspondent to telling the stories of his native Nebraska, and this book is no exception. In a series of mostly-true tales of settling into life in Centralia, Nebraska, after a few years spent in Colorado and Indiana, Welsch dials into the unique characters of the rural midwest, the hubs of community life, and the wry humor baked into America's heartland.

The City Of Trembling Leaves by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
There's more to Nevada than the glittering Vegas strip, and this semi-autobiographical work by Walter Van Tilburg Clark proves it when it whisks you away to turn-of-the-century Reno, Nevada. You can follow protagonist Tim Hazard along to picnics at Pyramid Lake, hikes on Mount Rose, and the snows of Lake Tahoe as he grows up in what was once a sleepy Western town.

The Dogs of March by Ernest Hebert
Set amidst the birches of New Hampshire The Dogs of March (and the six sequels that follow) capture the Granite State's slow shift from rural to suburban. Along the way, he digs into the class consciousness of New England and the way that both people and place can change – often in tandem, often influencing one another.

Pine Barrens by John McPhee
Now that The Plot Against America is getting an HBO treatment, many will be flocking to the speculative novel by Phillip Roth on which it is based – which is deeply rooted in the suburban streetscape of Newark familiar to frequent flyers and fans of The Sopranos. But turn to John McPhee's Pine Barrens escape New Jersey's larger-than-life mythology and see a different side of The Garden State, one unearthed by a four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and Princeton, New Jersey, native. 

Winter in Taos  by Mabel Dodge Luhan 
While many of the books on this list touch on rural America and small-town life, Mabel Luhan's Winter in Taos is instead intensely personal, the seasons in Taos bleeding and blending into Luhan's consciousness in a sensory buffet of adobe and cedar, wildflowers and pickled fruit, and a deep sense of home.

The Sunlight Dialogues by John Gardner
We're well versed in the myth, grit, and gleam of New York, and even in the cozy exurbs lining the Hudson and the old resort country of the Borscht Belt. But Western New York, the almost midwestern region near Buffalo and Rochester often gets short shrift, except in John Gardner's lovely Sunlight Dialogues, set in the 1960s-era bedroom community of Batavia, New York. Gardner reveals how even this little-known corner of the state is a melting pot – one that continues to roil to this day.

Serena by Ron Rash
If you pick up on shades of Macbeth in this tale of North Carolina timber camps in the 1930s, that's no accident. In a tale of ruthless ambition in an era predating environmental regulation, Rash captures the lush landscape of the western Carolinas, the stark contrast between the fortunes of the Appalachian working class and the timber barons who rule the woods – and the dangers inherent to both unfettered capitalism and boundless love. 

A Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
Pluto, North Dakota, isn't at the top of many travel bucket lists, but Louise Erdrich fills up what many imagine to be an empty landscape with a gaggle of characters, narrators, and plot threads that clamor into a portrait of the Plains and Chippewa reservation when passenger pigeons still crowded the sky. 

Giving Up the Ghost by Eric Nuzum
There's no shortage of turn-of-the last century classics like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio that capture early small town life in the Midwest. But Eric Nuzum dials in on a more recent chapter in Ohio's historic and cultural landscape, capturing the slow dread of Rust Belt decline in the 1980s and layering it with his own adolescent struggles, the music of the era, and a question about what it means for both person and place to be haunted.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
Grann digs up a historical footnote and spins it into a thrilling true-crime whodunit set on the Osage Reservation in 1920s Oklahoma. Though the story occasionally spills outside the Sooner State, the majority focuses on Oklahoma oil country in a tale that still has huge implications for a place still grappling with the legality of tribal land ownership.

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin
It might seem odd, or even disingenuous, to include a work of science fiction on a list of literature about real places you might visit. But part of Le Guin's immense talents in fantasy and sci-fi are her knack for making the unfamiliar and fantastic feel tangible. The Lathe of Heaven is a meditation on dreams and our individual power to change the fate of mankind, but it's also a walking-tour-worthy geography of Portland, Oregon, that captures the city's dreamy, gritty timelessness.

The Pittsburgh Anthology edited by Eric Boyd
Belt Publishing specializes in, among other things, city anthologies full of essays and artwork that get at the heart of what make the various metros of the Rust Belt so much themselves, so memorable and indelible to their inhabitants. This collection edited by Eric Boyd draws from a variety of contributors to chart not an elegy for the Steel City or slick marketing copy for its renaissance, but the real Pittsburgh in all its lovely, messy foibles, contradictions and joys.

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
A challenging novel that was considered for the Man Booker prize, Lahiri sends her characters from Calcutta, India to Providence, Rhode Island in this tale of Indian immigration in New England. Though it isn't as solely focused on a single place as many of the books on this list, Lahiri's study in contrasts highlights much of the good and bad of each location as she does in her characters, painting a complex portrait of family and distance.

Daughters of the Dust by Julie Dash
If you enjoyed Beyonce's Lemonade when it came out, you've unwittingly enjoyed the legacy of Julie Dash's family epic and love letter to South Carolina's Gullah culture. What began as a Sundance film with an iconic aesthetic was continued on the page, in this sequel set twenty years after the Daughters of the Dust film. In it, the Peazant family continues to preserve its unique blend of Africa, Indigenous and American traditions, handing them down to the next generation.

No Place Like Home by Linda Hasselstrom
Far from being only open prairie, Hasselstrom draws the readers attentions to community in the west – how they function, and how those functions have changed over time. It is a meditation on how people rely on one another even in remote places, and on how they rely on the natural world as part of that order.

Sutree by Cormac McCarthy
Before he became famous for his Borderlands trilogy, set in the southwest, Cormac McCarthy wrote a semi-autobiographical tale set closer to what had been home for much of his life, in Knoxville, Tennessee. It's part fishing story, part classic Southern literature, and a testament to life in East Tennessee on the southern fringes on the Appalachian Mountains.

Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation by John Phillip Santos
This beautiful literary memoir braids together the many strands of John Phillip Santos' long family history in Northern Mexico and Texas, their Chicano and Tejano identities and the complexities of living in the Nueva España landscape of San Antonio. The result is a work full of texture and color that makes San Antonio and Coahuila alike leap off the page. 

Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land by Amy Irvine
If you know nothing else about Utah, you know there is the desert, and there are Mormons. Trespass doesn't dispute these easy observations, but parses them for meaning. Throughout her essays, Amy Irvine explores both the environment and spirituality, the ways in which they are linked, and what they have to offer even those outsiders who seem to exist in friction with both.

Hidden History of Vermont by Mark Bushnell
From the Green Mountain Boys to Harpo Marx, Bushnell pulls back the curtain on some of the more surprising events to take place in Vermont's snow mountains and verdant woods, a treasure trove of anecdotes that will spell you until your next trip to New England.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
Centered near Dillard's home in Roanoke – a place named for one of the more eerie points in Virginia's history and mythos – these essays revel in the wonders of the Blue Ridge Mountains with stunning specificity of place and seasonality, all interwoven with a spirituality that established Dillard as an heir to the early Transcendentalists. 

The Living by Annie Dillard
Few writers are able to conjure up a sense of place on the page so well for such disparate locations as Virginia and Washington, but Pulitzer-winning Dillard accomplishes it over the span of her work. Using fiction this time, rather than essay, Dillard explores late 19th century Washington territory and the broader Pacific Northwest. She doesn't lack for detail despite not having her own personal diaries to rely on as she did with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and you'll walk away with a better understanding of Washington's foundations as a state.

The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake by Breece D'J Pancake
A little-known writer with a tragically short life, Breece D'J Pancake never saw his own collection of short stories published. That's a real shame, as these spare, subtle vignettes have shades of Hemingway and Southern Gothic applied to the Appalachian hollers of West Virginia. In Pancake's hands, his home state becomes a place of both gravity and melancholy, beauty and hope, a place both to escape and to return.

Shotgun Love Songs by Nickolas Butler
Sometimes you have to leave a place to understand it, and homecoming has often proved rich literary territory. Butler's debut proves no exception, with a tale of a group of five friends who grew up near Eau Claire and find themselves thrown together again as adults who have gone in very different directions – literally and figuratively. There they find the people they've become thrown in relief against the silos, VFWs, and diners of rural Wisconsin. 

The Virginian by Owen Wister
Don't let the title fool you – this novel is Wyoming through and through. Owen Wister essentially invented the Western genre when he wrote this story of the titular Virginian whose cowboy lifestyle carries him to Medicine Bow, Wyoming. Wister's work inspired such greats as Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour, and even shaped real-life Wyoming. For example, if you ever find yourself at the Occidental Hotel you can dine at the Virginian Restaurant named for Wister's protagonist. 

Grand Avenues: The Story of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French Visionary Who Designed Washington D.C. by Scott W. Berg
What happens when an unlikeable genius lays out plans for a city, only to be dismissed partway through the project by his new country's founding fathers? That's what happened to Pierre Charles L'Enfant, who is responsible for much of the Washington, DC, layout visitors and locals know and love today. Berg blends what could be the dry history of city planning with juicy drama, bringing some of early America's most compelling figures to life in a new way.

Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood by Judith Ortiz Cofer
Like many Puerto Ricans, Judith Ortiz Cofer spent a good portion of her life performing a balancing act between Puerto Rico and the mainland United States. In this work of creative nonfiction, Cofer conveys that high-wire act on the page, recounting her childhood split between Puerto Rico and Nuevo Yores and between cultures and languages, in a book that also balances between genres.