Whether or not they mow their own lawns, writers need to be landscapers. The landscapes (aka settings or locales) of books, stories, and poems can be just as important as characters, plot, and prose style in making a creative work bloom.

We’ve written in the past about how to make your landscapes multitask within your narrative, so we thought we’d offer examples of famous novels with memorable landscapes (novels many of our well-read blog visitors know well!). Why are these landscapes appropriate to these books? Why do they resonate with readers? We can all learn something from the way super-skilled authors establish settings.