Bookmark These U.S. Travel Spots for Readers

Literature lovers and scholars welcome you to step into spaces where great American writers lived, worked and found inspiration

people riding a horse drawn carriage with a church in the background

Our favorite stories are rooted in real locations, and visiting them helps keep their authors’ legacies alive. De Smet, South Dakota, for example, allows visitors to access Laura Ingalls Wilder’s childhood experience, covered wagon rides on the prairie and all.

Courtesy Travel South Dakota

Berit Thorkelson,

AARP

Published December 15, 2025

Words have the power to transport readers to places that exist only in their imagination. But they’re rooted in real locations that inspired their authors or provided the perfect setting for creativity to flow.

Think of the oceanside sardine factories John Steinbeck experienced, Anne Rice’s shadowy New Orleans–rooted worlds or the quiet New England farm where Robert Frost explored the relationship between good fences and good neighbors.

Visiting such sites helps coax stories and authors to life. “I think people, they want to become part of what they’ve read,” says Gen Xer Francis McGovern, who, with his wife, Linda, founded the website Literary Traveler in 1998 to share their passion for literature through travel.

“[People] want to experience it for themselves … to see a café where one of their favorite writers hung out, or where they lived, what was their writing studio like, what was their desk like. It’s a visceral, powerful thing,” he says.

McGovern says that literary tours typically attract travelers who value immersive and educational experiences enjoyed at a leisurely pace. He adds that older travelers generally fit well into this group. This aligns with research showing that older travelers are the main drivers of heritage tourism, defined as “experiencing the people, events and history of [an] area in an authentic way,” according to EBSCO, an online research database and educational resource provider.

These five destinations let travelers see where beloved American authors’ stories originated, helping to keep their legacy alive.

Visitors to the Ingalls Homestead living history site in De Smet, South Dakota, experience Laura Ingalls Wilder’s prairie life, including a one-room schoolhouse and a re-creation of the Ingalls family’s home on what was once their land.

Courtesy Travel South Dakota

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Midwestern Prairie

For Laura Ingalls Wilder fans, Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and De Smet, South Dakota, are the must-do combo. “You get the best feel for what she was exploring and learning about as she’s growing up in those sites, if you combine them,” says historian, museum specialist and longtime Wilder scholar Melanie Stringer.

Although Walnut Grove has a museum and some sites, the true highlight is the scenic prairie landscape, Stringer says. Visit the Gordon family farm, located north of town, to see the dugout home vividly described in On the Banks of Plum Creek, as well as the titular waterway where the young Ingalls sisters played.

Author Laura Ingalls Wilder of the ‘Little House’ books, in the 1950s.

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Two hours west is De Smet. Visitors can take a self-guided walking tour downtown, where the businesses in Wilder’s books once stood. At the Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society site nearby, tour a house where the Ingalls family lived and the one-room schoolhouse Wilder attended in Little Town on the Prairie.

Don’t miss the Ingalls Homestead, a couple of miles outside of town, where you can walk the grounds and participate in farm activities, including a ride on a covered wagon. Or stay overnight in one — a highlight of Stringer’s trip. “To do something like that out on the land that Charles once homesteaded, where Laura would have slept … that was incredible,” she says.

Toni Morrison’s childhood home still stands in Lorain, Ohio. Though it isn’t open for tours, visitors can explore the room dedicated to her at the local library, where she spent many hours.

Courtesy Lorain Public Library

Toni Morrison’s Ohio

In February, Ohio begins a statewide yearlong celebration of Toni Morrison, the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature, for novels including Beloved and The Bluest Eye.

Events across the state will honor Morrison and foster dialogue about her work, which explored the Black American experience. Johnny Coleman, emeritus professor of art and Africana studies at Ohio’s Oberlin College, joined Morrison during the 2009 installation of Oberlin’s black steel memorial titled “Bench by the Road.”

Author Toni Morrison in her Princeton University office on Oct. 7, 1993, after hearing that she had won the Nobel Prize for literature.

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It’s one of 34 such memorials across the globe, created to honor Morrison’s remark that there was no marker to acknowledge the pain and history of enslaved people in America — not even a tree or a “small bench by the road.” The bench serves as a grounding spot for contemplating Morrison’s life and themes in and around Oberlin, among the Underground Railroad’s most active stations. Coleman calls it “sacred ground, because so much happened here.… It’s one of those points on the earth that lights up with energy.”

Head north out of Oberlin for about 12 miles until you reach Lorain, Morrison’s birthplace, “on the lip of Lake Erie,” as she once said. It’s a proudly industrial city that contrasts with the progressive college town of Oberlin. While the house she was born in isn’t open to the public, the library where she spent many hours reading is. There, the Toni Morrison Reading Room is filled with her books, memorabilia, letters, pictures and, at Morrison’s request, comfortable chairs.

The yearlong Morrison celebration, which begins Feb. 18, 2026, in Columbus, concludes in Lorain on Feb. 18, 2027.

an intersection with shops and businesses

The titular setting for John Steinbeck’s novel, Cannery Row in Monterey, California, is now a tourist destination with shops and restaurants, yet it retains a strong sense of place.

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John Steinbeck’s Monterey County, California

John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel, Cannery Row, depicts life during the Great Depression along a waterfront street in Monterey, California. Once lined with sardine canning factories, it is now a tourist destination full of restaurants and shops.

The lab run by “Doc” in the book (and friend Ed Ricketts in real life) sits among the attractions. “Seeing the lab and imagining them spending time and talking there was a highlight for me,” says Corinne Levine, a travel adviser specializing in literary exploration at Novel Travels. “The real Cannery Row still retains a strong sense of place, allowing you to imagine stepping directly into the story.”

Author John Steinbeck at home circa 1962.

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Coming in 2026 is an interactive home for the Steinbeck Experience, designed to deepen the presence here of the Nobel– and Pulitzer Prize–winning author.

It’s a perfect pairing with Steinbeck’s hometown of Salinas, just 20 miles inland. The National Steinbeck Center and the John Steinbeck House are only a few blocks apart. The former offers interactive exhibits based on The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men. The latter is the Queen Anne Victorian home where he lived with his family until leaving for college in 1919. It’s now a restaurant open for lunch Tuesday through Saturday.

Visitors to the farm in Derry, New Hampshire, see where Robert Frost wrote some of his most beloved poems, including ‘Mending Wall,’ which considers the relationship between neighbors and fences.

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Robert Frost’s New England

A notable spot among the scattering of Robert Frost–related sites across New Hampshire and Vermont is the 30-acre chicken farm in Derry, New Hampshire, which Frost’s grandfather purchased in 1900 and gifted to Frost and his family. He hoped to earn a living as a farmer while writing poetry in his free time.

But it became clear he was more skilled at the secondary endeavor. He scraped by on the farm, but he was more interested in weaving his observations on nature and his neighbors into the poems that would later make up his earliest collections.

Poet Robert Frost, circa 1962.

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He sold the farm after fulfilling his grandfather’s 10-year mandate and used the money to launch his literary career, officially kick-started with his first published book, in 1913. Frost became the unofficial first U.S. poet laureate and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry a record four times.

Visitors to the Robert Frost Farm can see where the poet lived and worked and soak in the rural setting he pondered daily. “You can see the seasons change, and think and imagine him sitting down at the mending wall,” says McGovern, referencing the famous Frost poem and the remaining gray-stone border that likely inspired it. The farm is open May through October and has guided tours as well as a new self-guided nature and poetry trail.

Anne Rice lived and worked in Clairborne Cottage in New Orleans’ Garden District, which served as inspiration for the Mayfair home in the Mayfair Witches series.

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Anne Rice’s New Orleans

New Orleans’ captivating history, its Creole-meets-Victorian architecture and its colorful culture inspired Anne Rice’s supernatural fiction. When you wander its streets, it’s easy to see why, Levine says. Readers can zoom in on the Rice experience in the Garden District, where the author lived and wrote during the 1980s and 1990s, the decades when her output and popularity soared. It feels like stepping back in time.

“Standing in front of her home, I truly imagined what it must have been like for her to be inside, conceiving and writing her incredible books,” Levine says.

Author Anne Rice at a discussion and signing for her book ‘Prince Lestat: The Vampire Chronicles’ in 2014.

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The two-story Greek Revival–style home at 1239 First Street served as the setting for Rice’s Mayfair Witches book series, including The Witching Hour. It’s a privately owned site appreciated from the outside on self-led and guided tours. Half a mile away, Rice held signings at the Garden District Book Shop. There’s a section dedicated to the author as well as a Vampire’s Kiss drink at the in-store cocktail bar, aptly named Bar Epilogue.

It’s just around the corner from Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, which holds a tomb that is said to have inspired Lestat’s in Interview With the Vampire. The cemetery is closed for renovations, but tours include it from the gate. Rice, however, was buried in the family mausoleum, seven miles away in Metairie.

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Berit Thorkelson is a travel writer and editor for aarp.org. She has also written for publications such as National Geographic Traveler, Better Homes & Gardens and The Minnesota Star Tribune’s travel section.