Every author here built a distant country out of library shelves, maps and other people's travel notes. Some of those imagined places still shape how readers picture the real ones.
1DraculaBram Stoker's 1897 vampire novel opens in Transylvania, a region he never visited and knew only from books in the London Library.1000pts
2The Lost WorldArthur Conan Doyle put his 1912 dinosaur plateau in South America, one of the few continents his many travels never reached.873pts
3Tintin in TibetHergé drew his 1960 Himalayan album from books, photographs and climbers' accounts; he never travelled to Tibet.753pts
4Tarzan of the ApesEdgar Rice Burroughs set his 1912 jungle story in Africa without ever setting foot on the continent.565pts
5Michael StrogoffJules Verne's 1876 novel sends a courier across Siberia, a land Verne never visited and described from travellers' accounts.565pts
6The PrairieJames Fenimore Cooper wrote his 1827 novel of the Great Plains in Paris, never having travelled that far west himself.565pts
7Henderson the Rain KingSaul Bellow wrote his 1959 African novel from library research and anthropology classes, before he had ever been to Africa.439pts
8WinnetouKarl May's 1893 Apache saga is set in the American West, which he never saw; his only US trip came in 1908 and got no farther west than Buffalo.439pts
9William TellFriedrich Schiller's 1804 play about the Swiss hero was written by a man who never set foot in Switzerland and worked from maps.439pts
10The Mysteries of UdolphoAnn Radcliffe's 1794 Gothic novel is set in Italy and France, neither of which she had ever visited.439pts
11AmerikaFranz Kafka's unfinished novel about a young immigrant in the United States was written by an author who never crossed the Atlantic.0pts
12The Tigers of MompracemEmilio Salgari's 1900 Sandokan novel is set off the coast of Borneo, though Salgari never left Italy.0pts
13Lost HorizonJames Hilton invented Shangri-La in Tibet in his 1933 novel without ever having visited Tibet or the Himalaya.0pts
