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Books Set in Your Town

tkingdoll said:
The Hobbit is set in my village, as is the start and end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Beat that.
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Well, The War of the Worlds lays waste to Woking and Leatherhead in Surrey, where I grew up, together with the Richmond and Putney area, where I now live. The second graphic novel of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which hijacks Wells' story, depicts a Martian tripod destroying a train crossing Barnes Bridge, the bridge in my avatar.
 
DickK said:
Well, The War of the Worlds lays waste to Woking and Leatherhead in Surrey, where I grew up, together with the Richmond and Putney area, where I now live. The second graphic novel of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which hijacks Wells' story, depicts a Martian tripod destroying a train crossing Barnes Bridge, the bridge in my avatar.
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Hmm. That does contend with my claim quite well. I will trump you: I have met Alan Moore, both professionally and socially.

Neener :p
 
Thom Wolfe's "Look Homeward, Angel" - set in Both Asheville and Chapel Hill, NC. Also books by Jill McCorkle are typically set in small Southern towns that could be Chapel Hill. She even wrote one about my birthday: July 7th.

Then there is , of course, "The Carolina Way" by legendary basketball coach Dean Smith.

Go Heels!
 
Enid Blyton lived in my village and she wrote a series called "The Old Thatch" which was the name of her cottage. Also Edgar Wallace lived here so he may have set some of his many, many works here as well.
 
well Peterborough New Hampshire has the Mac Dowell Colony for artists, musicians and writers. You stay in a cabin and they feed you and you write, or paint or whatever.

Still going on today, but that's where the play "Our Town" was first drafted and is openly based upon.

Rudyard Kipling wrote "The Jungle Book" while living in Brattleboro Vermont (his house is still the coolest in town). Sadly, not based on the actual town. But odd to think of him spending a long Vermont winter writing "The Jungle Book".
 
When I read or hear someone say a "colony of artists" it always conjures up the image of David Attenborough making a documentary and saying in his breathless voice "And here we see the artist in their natural surroundings, we have to be very quiet as they are easily disturbed...."
 
Darat that is so true! I remember reading a biography of a writer talking about her time at the MacDowell colony. She just about went nuts in the quiet of the woods, and not seeing anyone all day (they leave your lunch in a little basket outside the door of your cottage) pretty much did her creativity in.

The town also isn't very happy with the colony. For one thing, the colony is non profit and that is a lot of land not paying taxes!
 
I grew up in Iowa. The University of Iowa, where I got my degrees, hosts the famous Writers Workshop. Perhas as a consequence, Iowa City or its landmarks gets mentioned in quite a few novels. A couple of notables are "Slaughterhouse Five" and "Cat's Cradle" by Kurt Vonnegut (who participated in the Workshop, as did John Irving, Philip Roth....)

"Shoeless Joe" is set in this area. This novel was made into the movie Field of Dreams, which was set in Iowa and shot mostly in Iowa.

Robert A. Heinlein's "The Puppet Masters" depicted the destruction of Des Moines. In the movie based on the story, my former office is visible in the climactic helicopter scene.

In the novel "The Stand," Stephen King depicts event occurring at a Des Moines intersection with which I am familiar. (If memory serves, I visited that very intersection on very day that those events were said to occur.)

I'm also somewhat familiar with the locations depicted in the moviesCrash Landing: The Rescue of Flight 232 and Bridges of Madison County.
 
Je Recuse (with apologies to Emile Zola)

I have lived in the following cities:

New Orleans (numerous works)
Memphis (not so many as N.O., but numerous, nevertheless)
Tulsa (Rumble Fish & The Outsiders and anything else by Hinton)
New York (not even the number one locale, believe it or not)
Montreal (Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, St. Urbain's Horseman and countless books in Quebecois(French-Canadian)
Pittsburgh (I draw a blank)
Taipei (3 gazillion Taiwanese works over the last forty years)
Hong Kong* (five billion movies and countless books)

*If you count films and television, Hong Kong is probably the city in the world with the most "sitings". (Bombay would be close, but it's limited to Indian material while H.K. shows up works from every country in the world, it seems.)

Actually, that's an interesting sidebar...

Q: Which cities/locales show up in the most movies, tv, songs, books, poetry? The kneejerk response would be the first three or four, below, but I think H.K. would be ahead.
London
Paris
New York
L.A./Hollywood/Beverly Hills
Hong Kong
Bombay
Delhi/New Delhi? (not sure)
Berlin
Cairo/Egypt
Rome
 
To the best of my knowledge there are no works of fiction set in Gander, Newfoundland. I'm hardly surprised.
 
Quite a few and one by a mate of mine, ("Shadowboxing" by Tony Birch for the aussies here). But probably the most famous was "On the Beach" about a post-nuclear holocaust world with Melbourne being one of the surviving cities
 
Fitter said:
To the best of my knowledge there are no works of fiction set in Gander, Newfoundland. I'm hardly surprised.
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I think there's a back-handed insult in the first popular Quebecois movie, "Y'A Plus de Trou a Perce", when someone says, roughly, "Well, at least it's not Gander!" - or something like that. But that could've been from television. I remember a lady in my office in the early 70s (a Quebecoise) thinking the line was hysterically funny, 'cuz she'd had a boyfriend who was at the CFB there, and he'd hated his tour.
 
When I read or hear someone say a "colony of artists" it always conjures up the image of David Attenborough making a documentary and saying in his breathless voice "And here we see the artist in their natural surroundings, we have to be very quiet as they are easily disturbed...."
Click to expand...

I thought that was Monty Python?

To the best of my knowledge there are no works of fiction set in Gander, Newfoundland. I'm hardly surprised.
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Guess you know what you can do with all that retirement time - and don't forget to get the accent right!

Susan
 
Q: Which cities/locales show up in the most movies, tv, songs, books, poetry? The kneejerk response would be the first three or four, below, but I think H.K. would be ahead.
London
Paris
New York
L.A./Hollywood/Beverly Hills
Hong Kong
Bombay
Delhi/New Delhi? (not sure)
Berlin
Cairo/Egypt
Rome
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No fair - big cities

You didn't include Baghdad, Agatha Christie used that as a sight bunches of times.

Susan
 
Fantasy writer Rick Shelley wrote a trilogy called the "Varayan Memoir" where the mundane parts are set in Louisville.

Various Kentucky Derby-related novels are of course set here.

There was a thriller of sorts about a president elected in 1980 and a terrorist trying to kill him and always failing by accident. It was played straight, too. Anyhow, the president was from Kentucky and clearly he author hadn't done his homework (he got the gubernatorial election dates wrong and had his character being elected to a second consecutive term, which wasn't allowed them). More to the point, the President is driving into Louisville from the airport and his limo nearly gets creamed by a pickup truck which swerves off the other lane of the interstate and runs most of the way across the median, but the Louisville airport is in the city and it's urban freeway all the way. :footinmou

:blackcat:
 
Darat said:
When I read or hear someone say a "colony of artists" it always conjures up the image of David Attenborough making a documentary and saying in his breathless voice "And here we see the artist in their natural surroundings, we have to be very quiet as they are easily disturbed...."
Click to expand...
:biggrin:
 
Philip José Farmer is a prolific sci-fi author who lives in Peoria, Illinois. He may be as well know by the pseudonym Kilgore Trout. Trout was a fictional author, a character created by Kurt Vonnegut, who Farmer "brought to life" as the named author of one of his own works.

Anyway, Farmer wrote a book entitled Nothing Burns in Hell, a detective story published in 1999, set in and around Peoria. And because he lives here, it's likely that the settings for some of Farmer's other works were at least inspired by the local atmosphere. But I'll admit I'm not very familiar with his work.

Also, the classic Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters, was published in 1915. The setting for that material, the Spoon River area of Illinois, is just over in the next county.
 
Don't forget the memorable, My Life in Pictures - BPSCG Reflects.
 
LibraryLady said:
One of Tom Clancy's books names my library as a great place to make a drug buy. We don't like him.
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Really? Trainspotting is set in Leith and has led to the establishment of tours around some of the locations referred to in the book/film including the "dirtiest toilet in Scotland". It is not exactly the most positive and uplifting book/film ever, but does attract tourists. Has the Clancy thing led to undesirables actually turning up believing it to be true?

Irvine Welsh has also set other books in Leith. Widen it out to Edinburgh and you get a few crime series: Ian Rankin's Rebus books, Quinton Jardine's Skinner series and Paul Johnston's wonderfully dark series set in the Edinburgh of the near future based around Quinton Dalrymple.

And for some wonderfully dark humour, some set in Edinburgh, I thoroughly recommend Christopher Brookmyre. I will even forgive the fact that he set his last book, concerned with an investigation into ESP, in Glasgow.
 
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