New Jersey

3M said, "There are some Pulitzers that are set in these states, but I have no idea if the setting is integral to the book: New Jersey - American Pastoral by Philip Roth (I don't like Roth, but it’s a Pulitzer) ... Independence Day by Richard Ford (Pulitzer)."

In American Pastoral by Philip Roth, Seymour "Swede" Levov — a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory — comes of age in thriving, triumphant postwar America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s. Not even the most private, well-intentioned citizens, it seems, get to sidestep the sweep of history. American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American's rise and fall — of a strong, confident master of social equilibrium overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder. For the Swede is not allowed to stay forever blissful inside the beloved hundred-and-seventy-year-old stone farmhouse, in rural Old Rimrock, where he lives with his pretty wife — the college sweetheart who was Miss New Jersey of 1949 — and the lively, precocious daughter who is the apple of his eye. The apple of his eye, that is, until she grows up to be a revolutionary terrorist bent on destroying her father's paradise. American Pastoral presents a vivid portrait of how the innocence of Swede Levov is swept away by the times — of how everything industriously created by his family in America over three generations is left in a shambles by the explosion of a bomb in his own bucolic backyard.

Independence Day is essentially an internal monologue, set on the long July 4th weekend of 1988. In this sequel to The Sportswriter, the protagonist is Frank Bascombe, a divorced, well-educated former sportswriter who now makes his living selling real estate in the affluent New Jersey town of Haddam, while supplementing his earnings with a couple of rental properties he owns in the town's African American neighborhood. While Frank is trying to give his disinterested son a civics lesson on the meaning of Independence Day, Paul feigns confusion and asks a question or two, which Frank knows were really meant to mock him. Paul delights at ridiculing the hall of fame.

Massachusetts

3M said, "There are some Pulitzers that are set in these states, but I have no idea if the setting is integral to the book: Massachusetts - The Late George Apley by John Phillips Marquand (Pulitzer)."

John P. Marquand (1893-1960) wrote several widely admired and bestselling novels, among them the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Late George Apley (1937). Sweeping us into the inner sanctum of Boston society, into the Beacon Hill town houses and exclusive private clubs where only the city's wealthiest and most powerful congregate, this novel gives us — through the story of one family and its patriarch, the recently deceased George Apley — the portrait of an entire society in transition. Gently satirical and rich with drama, the novel moves from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression as it projects George Apley's world — and subtly reveals a life in which success and accomplishment mask disappointment and regret, a life of extreme and enviable privilege that is nonetheless an imperfect life.

Indiana

3M said, "What about A Girl Named Zippy for Indiana?"

When Haven Kimmel was born in 1965, Mooreland, Indiana was a sleepy little hamlet of three hundred people. Nicknamed "Zippy" for the way she would run around like a circus monkey, this small girl was possessed of big eyes and even bigger ears. In this lovingly told memoir, Kimmel takes readers back in time to when small-town America was still trapped in the amber of the innocent post-war period: people help their neighbors, go to church, keep barnyard animals in their backyards.

To three-year-old Zippy, it makes perfect sense to strike a bargain with her father to keep her baby bottle — never mind that when she does, it's the first time she's ever spoken. The words never stop once Zippy finds her voice, and it is a voice that Kimmel captures perfectly page after page. In her nonplussed family, Zippy has the ideal supporting cast: her beautiful yet dour brother, Danny, a seeker of the true faith; her sweetly sensible sister, Lindy, who wins the local beauty pageant; her mother, Delonda, who dispenses wisdom from the corner of the couch; and her father, Bob Jarvis, who never met a bet he didn't take. The world seen through Zippy's eyes is vivid and occasionally mind-boggling, especially when Zippy grapples with the meaning of time and has to go lie in a "worm hole" to recover.

Whether describing a serious case of chicken love, another episode with the evil old woman across the street, or the night Zippy's dad borrows thirty-six coon dogs and a raccoon to prove to the complaining neighbors just how quiet his two dogs are, Kimmel treats readers to a heroine as appealing, naive, and knowing as Scout Finch as she navigates the quirky adult world surrounding Zippy.

Update, still need 13 states

We have at least one book for 37 states, but we are missing any mention (so far) of 13 states:

Connecticut
Delaware
Illinois
Indiana
Massachusetts
New Jersey
North Dakota
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Dakota
Utah
Virginia
Wisconsin

Even states we have mentioned may need more suggestions. Many have only one book mentioned so far, which means we may not have found the BEST of the bunch.

Idaho

... is only part of one book, not really a whole book about the state. Do you know of any others? Please keep those suggestions coming in ... and thanks to everyone who has suggested a book or books.

Now, take a look at our UPDATED "visited states" map at the bottom of this page.

Kansas

Framed said, "Lynne @ http://lynneslittlecorner.blogspot.com/ added The Wizard of Oz for Kansas."

Hailed as the first original American fairy tale, The Wizard of Oz inspired countless sequels and imitations, as well as the classic American musical film and the Broadway musical The Wiz. In L. Frank Baum's imaginative story, Dorothy Gale takes a magical journey from the American heartland into the wonderful land of Oz to meet the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion.

Ohio

Framed said, "Lynne @ http://lynneslittlecorner.blogspot.com/ added "And the Ladies of the Club" by Helen Hooven Santmyer for Ohio. Ladies is a great book but big. It's an epic starting in the late 1800's, I think."

"...And Ladies of the Club" centers on the members of a book club and their struggles to understand themselves, each other, and the tumultuous world they live in.

Yikes! Yes, it IS long ... at 1184 pages! I think the author sounds interesting: "Helen Hooven Santmyer was born in 1895 and lived in Xenia, Ohio. In addition to her career as a writer, she worked as an English professor, a dean of women, and a librarian." But I wish the publisher had told me more about the book. A reviewer named Stan (a man, no less) had this to say: "The book is the story of a fictional medium-sized town in southern Ohio, from just after the Civil War to the beginning of the Depression. The story is told primarily through the eyes of a women's book club, and focuses particularly on two of the club's members and their families. All the important themes of life are explored: love, race, jealousy, religion, war, politics, business, literature, education, family relationships, and death. If you read this book, you will be both moved to tears and richly educated in American history. How much more can you ask of one book?"

Wyoming

Framed said, "Candleman @ http://www.carpecrustulum.blogspot.com/ suggested An Unfinished Life for Wyoming. Don't know the author."

In an extraordinary tale of love and forgiveness, Mark Spragg brings us this novel of a complex, prodigal homecoming. After escaping the last of a long string of abusive boyfriends, Jean Gilkyson and her ten-year-old daughter Griff have nowhere left to go. Nowhere except Ishawooa, Wyoming, where Jean's estranged father-in-law, Einar, still blames her for the death of his son. Though Einar isn’t glad to see either of them, Griff falls in love with his sprawling ranch and quiet way of life, as she slowly gets to know his crippled old friend Mitch, the cats that lurk in the barn at milking time, and finally the grandfather she had lost for so many years. An emotionally charged story of hard-won friendship and reconciliation, An Unfinished Life shows a novelist of extraordinary talents in the fullness of his powers.

Framed continued, "That suggestion led me to Where Rivers Change Directions by Mark Spragg and Fencing the Sky by James Galvin also for Wyoming."

Where Rivers Change Direction: A Memoir by Mark Spragg is a collection of essays telling an unforgettable story of an adolescence spent on the oldest dude ranch in Wyoming, a remote spread on the Shoshone National Forest, the largest block of unfenced wilderness in the lower forty-eight states. On the occasion of buying his first horse, Spragg earns a rare day-off from work and spends it at a stock auction with his father, a man whose love, though earned, remains ineffable. A life-threatening accident on an elk hunt in a remote wilderness area becomes a reflection upon the depth and nature of the bond between a young man and his mentor. A boy's desire to fire a gun is cause for questioning rites of passage that wed manhood and violence. A mortally injured wild horse and a mysterious, reclusive neighbor haunt the winter Spragg spends as a caretaker at a snow-bound ranch where the dance between life and death, sanity and insanity, is inescapable. Where Rivers Change Direction illuminates the unexpected wisdom and irrevocable truth embedded in the small but profound dramas of one boy's journey toward manhood. From a wild and unforgiving setting emerges an individual of extraordinary fortitude, humility, and understanding.

Fencing the Sky by James Galvin reveals how passion can send circumstances spiraling out of control: the inevitable clash when people believe the land they love is threatened. Galloping through the lush, beaver-worked draw looking for stray cows, Mike Arans never imagined that he was about to kill a man by swinging a nylon lasso around his neck. Once the man was dead, Mike pulled a notepad and pencil stub from his pocket and wrote, "I did this." He signed the note and stuffed it into the dead man's breast pocket. Mike then returned home, stocked up on supplies, and within minutes was heading west. Thus begins what turns out to be a dramatic escape into the rugged wilderness of northern Colorado and Wyoming. The novel's deeper story, however, goes back many years and confronts the issues that divide contemporary westerners. At its center are Ad, Oscar, and Mike, whose lives turn with the seasons and the rigors of ranch life, mountain-hardened men who do not possess but are themselves possessed by the land.

Maine

3M said, "I've also heard that A Country of Pointed Firs by Jewett is good for Maine." (Yikes! Michelle suggested this ten days ago! I never got it posted and just ran across it again. Please help me, everyone. If you notice I failed to post a suggested book, or forgot to put a title in the sidebar list, or whatever ... please let me know!)

Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs was published in 1896, and it quickly garnered a reputation for its truthfulness and the quality of its writing. Rudyard Kipling described it as "immense -- it is the very life," and Henry James praised it for being "absolutely true -- not a word overdone -- such elegance and exactness." It's a classic of American fiction, memorializing the traditions, manners and dialect of Maine coast natives at the turn of the 20th century. In luminous evocations of their lives, Maine-born Jewett created startlingly real portraits of individual New Englanders, and a warm, humorous and compassionate vision of New England character.

Though nominally a novel, The Country of the Pointed Firs lacks the coherent, unifying plot of more traditional books. Instead, Jewett creates a mosaic of tales and character sketches, all set in the fictional Maine fishing hamlet of Dunnet Landing. The unnamed narrator, an unmarried female writer (like Jewett herself), has come to the town seeking a summer of solitude and work. But she’s drawn to the villagers she meets. Most of them are over sixty, alone, and covering a roiling inner ocean of feeling with a craggy exterior as rocky as the ragged coastline. Entranced by their stories, she allows them to enter her life.

New York

Bonnie said, "Forever by Pete Hamill is a book about New York that will require a suspension of disbelief, but I really enjoyed the book."

Forever by Pete Hamill is the magical, epic tale of an extraordinary man who arrives in New York in 1740 and remains. . . forever. Through the eyes of young Cormac O'Connor—granted immortality as long as he never leaves the island of Manhattan—we watch New York grow from a tiny settlement on the tip of an untamed wilderness to the thriving metropolis of today. And through Cormac's remarkable adventures in both love and war, we come to know all the city's buried secrets—the way it has been shaped by greed, race, and waves of immigration, by the unleashing of enormous human energies, and, above all, by hope.

Kentucky

3M said, "I noticed you don't have any books for Kentucky. I just moved from there and would like to suggest books by Wendell Berry and Silas House. Jayber Crow, Hannah Coulter, and Nathan Coulter are some from Berry. Silas House has these three books in chronological order (nor order of publication): Parchment of Leaves, The Coal Tattoo, and Clay's Quilt."



Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. Returning once again to the Port William membership, Berry has written his best novel yet, a book certain to confirm his reputation as one of America's finest novelists. From the simple setting of his own barber shop, Jayber Crow, orphan, seminarian, and native of Port William, recalls his life and the life of his community as it spends itself in the middle of the twentieth century. Surrounded by his friends and neighbors, he is both participant and witness as the community attempts to transcend its own decline. And meanwhile Jayber learns the art of devotion and that a faithful love is its own reward.

Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry. "Ignorant boys, killing each other," is just about all Nathan Coulter would tell his wife about the Battle of Okinawa in November 1945. Life continued as some boys returned from the war while the lives of others were mourned. Nathan's wife, Hannah, has time now to tell of the years since the war. In her eighties, twice widowed and alone, Hannah shares her memories: of her childhood, of young love and loss, of raising children and the changing seasons. She turns her plain gaze to a community facing its own deterioration, where, she says, "We feel the old fabric torn, pulling apart, and we know how much we have loved each other." Hannah offers her summation: her stories and her gratitude for membership in Port William. We see her whole life as part of the great continuum of love and memory, grief and strength. Hannah Coulter is the latest installment in Wendell Berry's long story about the citizens of Port William, Kentucky. In his unforgettable prose, we learn of the Coulters' children, of the Feltners and Branches, and how survivors "live right on."

Nathan Coulter by Wendell Berry. "Young Nathan struggles to grow up and understand the value of land and family. With the death of his grandfather, Nathan sees that "his life couldn't be divided from the days he'd spent at work in his fields."



Parchment of Leaves by Silas House. "So it is that Vine, Cherokee-born and raised in the early 1900s, trains her eye on a young white man, forsaking her family and their homeland to settle in with Saul's people: his smart-as-a-whip, slow-to-love mother, Esme; his brother Aaron, a gifted banjo player, hot tempered and unpredictable; and Aaron's flightly and chattery Melungeon wife, Aidia." It's a delicate negotiation into this new family and culture, one that Vine's mother had predicted would not go smoothly. But it's worse than she could have imagined. Vine is viewed as an outsider by the townspeople. Aaron, she slowly realizes, is strangely fixated on her. But what is at first difficult becomes a test of her spirit. And in the violent turn of events that ensues, she learns what it means to forgive others and, most important, how to forgive herself.

The Coal Tattoo by Silas House tells the story of Easter and Anneth, tragically left parentles as children, who must raise themselves and each other in their small coal-mining town. Easter is deeply religious, keeps a good home, believes in tradition, and is intent on rearing her wild younger sister properly. Anneth is untamable, full of passion, determined to live hard and fast. The two sisters can't stand to live together, but can't bear to be apart.

Clay's Quilt by Silas House. On a bone-chilling New Year's Day, when all the mountain roads are slick with ice, Clay's mother, Anneth, insists on leaving her husband. She packs her things, and with three-year-old Clay in tow, they inch their way toward her hometown along the treacherous mountain roads. That journey ends in the death of Clay's mother. It's a day that comes to haunt her only son, who's left without a family and a history. This is the story of how Clay Sizemore, a coal miner in love with his town but unsure of his place within it, finds a family to call his own.

Oregon

Bonnie said, "I found this one because it's listed on 3M's Pulitzer Project, to read all 81 books that have ever won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Although I never got it read, a friend recommended this book to me as a good one about Oregon."

Honey in the Horn is the first novel by Harold Lenoir Davis. It is set in turn-of-the-century Oregon ... and that would be the turn of the LAST century. The novel received the Harper's Prize for fiction the year it was published (1935) and the Pulitzer Prize in 1936. Here's how the book begins:

"There was a run-down old tollbridge station in the Shoestring Valley of Southern Oregon where Uncle Preston Shiveley had lived for fifty years, outlasting a wife, two sons, several plagues of grasshoppers, wheat-rust and caterpillars, a couple or three invasions of land-hunting settlers and real-estate speculators, and everybody else except the scattering of old pioneers who had cockleburred themselves onto the country at about the same time he did."

One reviewer called it "a rollicking good story."

Nebraska

Bonnie said, "I heartily recommend One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus. The setting is Nebraska Territory, on the Great Plains of the United States. I wrote my review of the book today and rated it 9.5 out of 10. I couldn't put it down."

One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd is historical fiction. Jim Fergus got the idea for this novel from an actual historical event; at a peace conference at Fort Laramie, a prominent Northern Cheyenne chief requested of the U.S. Army authorities the gift of 1,000 white women as brides for his young warriors. Because theirs is a matrilineal society in which all children born belong to their mother's tribe, this seemed to the Cheyennes to be the perfect means of assimilation into the white man's world, a world they already recognized held no place for them. Needless to say, this request was not well received by the white authorities, and nothing came of it. In the novel the women come west.

Committed to an insane asylum by her blueblood family for an affair with a man beneath her station, May Dodd finds that her only hope of freedom is to participate in a secret government program whereby women from the "civilized" world become the brides of Cheyenne warriors. Along the way she falls in love with John Bourke, a young army captain, even though she has promised to marry the great chief Little Wolf.

New Hampshire

Bonnie said, "I recommend Beachcombing For A Shipwrecked God by Joe Coomer, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. One character leaves Kentucky after being widowed and winds up in New Hampshire living on a boat with the elderly owner and a 17-year-old girl."

Nine weeks after losing her husband, Charlotte escapes to New Hampshire, where she takes up residence on a wooden motor yacht named after Don Quixote's horse. Her landlady is an aging blue-haired trompe l'oeil artist, and her cabin mate is an overweight adolescent with an abusive boyfriend. Together these three laugh, cry, and battle injustices.

Off the boat, Charlotte, an archaeologist, joins a local excavation to uncover an ancient graveyard. Here she can indulge her passion for reconstructing the past, even as she tries to bury her own recent history. She comes to realize, however, that the currents of time are as fluid and persistent as the water that drifts beneath her comforting new home. Together the shipmates share some unforgettable adventures, including a madcap trip on the sea in search of the house of Anne of Green Gables.

Arizona

Jill said, "I just finished a collection of essays by Barbara Kingsolver called High Tide in Tucson, and this is my selection for the beautiful state of Arizona. Kingsolver chooses many settings from her essays, but her descriptions of Arizona are ecological, historical and practical. I think it gives the reader a wonderful snapshot about this state. You can read my review here."

In High Tide in Tucson Barbara Kingsolver explores the themes of family, community, and the natural world. With the eyes of a scientist and the vision of a poet, Kingsolver writes about notions as diverse as modern motherhood, the history of private property, and the suspended citizenship of humans in the animal kingdom. Her canny pursuit of meaning from an inscrutable world compels us to find instructions for life in surprising places: a museum of atomic bomb relics, a West African voodoo love charm, an iconographic family of paper dolls, the ethics of a wild pig who persistently invades a garden, a battle of wills with a two-year-old, or a troop of oysters who observe high tide in the middle of Illinois. In sharing her thoughts about the urgent business of being alive, Kingsolver the essayist employs the same keen eyes, persuasive tongue, and understanding heart that characterize her acclaimed fiction.