In his Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (2004), novelist Peter Turchi suggests that there are important links between maps, stories, and the mind, including the fact that the study of all three seem to have begun at about the same point in history: Turchi states: “Alphabetic texts, the earliest extant geographical maps, and the earliest extant map of the human brain” date back to around 3000-bc, thereby suggesting a close association among them. He says, “To ask for a map is to say, 'Tell me a story.'” Noting the similarities between maps and stories, Turchi quotes Emerson: “The Writer is an explorer: Every step is an advance into new land.” Turchi himself asserts that “artistic creation is a voyage into the unknown. In our own eyes, we are off the map.” He compares finding one's way in an unknown land or in the mind itself to the experience of writing: discovering the subject, through trial and error, failed attempts, and wrong paths taken, finally to find new knowledge of the world and the self which then enables the writer to guide others to make their own discoveries.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing to the present, novels have provided American readers with maps for living in a rapidly expanding and evolving country. As the population grew and moved across the landscape, new and established Americans read stories that depicted the opportunities, values, and challenges that the complexity of being or becoming American presented to individuals. While peoples in all times and places have needed maps and narratives, this need has been especially compelling in the vast immigrant nation of the United States in the last two centuries.