Please note: All the sites listed below are fictional, the products of these authors’ imaginations, visitable only in the pages of their books. Please don’t get yourself lost looking for Altamont or Tims Creek.

Sites on the Walking Tour:

• Thicketty Creek, the setting for Wilma Dykeman's debut (and most celebrated) novel, The Tall Woman
• Altamont, a fictionalized version of Thomas Wolfe’s hometown Asheville, the main setting for his classic novel Look Homeward, Angel
• Stone County, the western Piedmont setting for Tall Houses in Winter and The Scarlet Thread, the first two novels by Doris Betts, who based Stone on her native Iredell County
• Listre, the setting for Clyde Edgerton’s debut novel, Raney, and based loosely on his hometown of Bethesda in Durham County
• Colleton County, based on Margaret Maron’s native Johnston County, provides the setting for Maron’s Deborah Knott mystery series
• Falls, inspired by Allan Gurganus’s hometown of Rocky Mount, is the setting for several of his works, including his debut novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
• Tims Creek, the setting for Randall Kenan’s debut novel A Visitation of Spirits as well as several other stories and novels, is based on Chinquapin, where the author grew up
• Fulton, is a fictional town in which Jill McCorkle set Life After Life and other works, based on her hometown of Lumberton
• Wellington, is the fictional stand-in for Wilmington in Charles W. Chesnutt’s classic novel The Marrow of Tradition