In a few choice sentences in each of his novels of contemporary family life, novelist Pat Conroy lifts the veil on the Low Country of South Carolina that he has known from boyhood. E.L. Doctorow, with resonant word images, reveals New York sites and experiences from an earlier time that have meaning for our day. Ivan Doig, from the rugged crags of the western United States, weaves sentences together and opens readers' eyes to the vastness of Montana, while David Guterson, traversing the land, dapples pages of his books with glimpses of life on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

Regional literature is thriving these days across the United States, from Stephen King's Maine to Garrett Hongo's Hawaii. The sheer impact of the contributions of hundreds of novelists, poets, essayists, naturalists and biographers is palpable. Indeed, to gain a sense of the nation -- its landscape, its spirit, its achievements and its challenges -- one might do well to forgo the specificities of guidebooks, and simply turn to the works of literary artists, just as others might turn, in different circumstances, to the canvases of visual artists.

There is nothing new, actually, about a regional tradition in American literature. It is as old as Native American legends, as evocative of place as the 19th-century writings of James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain and Bret Harte, as vibrant as the worlds created earlier in this century by novelist William Faulkner and playwright Tennessee Williams, as reflective of society as the novels of Sinclair Lewis and Eudora Welty. Today, these writers and others from generations past have contemporary counterparts, who are keeping the tradition alive.

Regional literature in the 1990s is expansive and diverse. It infiltrates genres. It is mirrored in the writings of tenth-generation Americans and those of the new ethnics. The special properties of certain regions loom in poetry and drama, as well as in fiction and nonfiction. Regional writing reflects, as before, not only geography, but also moods and yearnings, dialects and idiosyncrasies. It encompasses the tangible and the intangible. For the most part, the literature of "place" tends to be rooted, involved, committed -- frequently striking what nature essayist Barry Lopez calls a "hopeful tone" in "an era of cynical detachment." And it proclaims, at the dawn of a new century, that American culture is creative and meaningful, from one tract of land to another, and on all social and economic levels as well.

Interest and participation in regional literature -- coming, critic Sven Birkerts suggests, in response to the minimalist or postmodernist fiction of the past generation -- is enjoying considerable impact, with accompanying reverberations. It has given rise, for instance, to the launching of a number of bookstores -- such as Boston's Globe and Chicago's Savvy Traveler -- specializing in fiction and nonfiction related to particular spots, arranged by site. Thus a would-be traveler who heads for the bookstore shelf marked "Southwestern United States" in advance of a trip to that region quite likely will find Tony Hillerman's mysteries and Rudolfo Anaya's novels available for purchase.

Cause and effect can blur. It is difficult to ascertain, for example, whether smaller regional publishing houses sprang up because of a wealth of writers in their area, or whether the opening of such firms sparked a literary explosion there. Still, the fact is that regional publishers and regional writers are contributing mightily to literature in America. Moreover, in addition to the ascent of such publishers as Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, which has introduced readers to an array of North Carolina writers such as Clyde Edgerton and Jill McCorkle, the number of regional literary journals continues to grow. Add to that the support, for more than a quarter-century, that the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts provided to both established and fledgling literary workshops that discovered new talents across the nation. (Although the U.S. Government no longer is able to provide the level of funding it has in the past, because of budgetary constraints, the corporate and private sectors continue to support these activities.)

The picture, then, is a healthy one, and both writers and readers are beneficiaries.

Who are these writers, and where are they? And how does "place" manifest itself?

A journey along the byways of regional literature might begin in the Northeast -- in Bangor, Maine, home of Stephen King, one of the nation's more popular fabulists. Making use of his base, he has created an endless string of fantasy and horror best-sellers set in the state. Across the boundary of New England, Albany, New York, is the focus of attention of one of its native sons, journalist turned novelist William Kennedy, whose stories set in the state capital capture elegiacally yet often raucously the lives of the denizens of the city's streets and saloons.

New York City may have more writers per capita than any other city in the United States -- and possibly the world -- yet most of them aren't writing about their town. Indeed, for a place so indelibly etched in the minds of tourists and other travelers, New York has been captured only by a select few novelists who, more often than not, use the literary form to focus on social concerns. Tom Wolfe -- predominantly a writer of nonfiction -- may have created the quintessential New York City novel when he wrote The Bonfire of the Vanities, a swirling seriocomic work about the interconnection of politics and society. Equally focused, in treating New York life at earlier moments in time, are the writings of E.L. Doctorow. They capture the city's moods at various moments in the past 100 years: the tensions of turn-of-the-century America, the lawlessness of the Prohibition years, the wide-eyed futurism triggered by the 1939 World's Fair, and the sober realities of the Cold War era -- all with the city as backdrop. And, for glimpses into down-home life on the streets of the boroughs, readers can choose from the innocence of Avery Corman's neighborhood imagery; the more visceral, crime-infested world as depicted in the fiction of Richard Price; and the rhythmic pulses of the city's Hispanic section that novelist Oscar Hijuelos knows so intimately.

Moving past central Pennsylvania, where John Updike traced the peripatetic journey of one Rabbit Angstrom against the backdrop of more than three decades of American contemporary history, we journey to Maryland. There, in the environs of Baltimore, Anne Tyler continues to delineate, in spare, quiet language, ordinary and extraordinary events in the lives of her characters -- and the introverted mood of the region as well. On the Chesapeake Bay waterways lapping against the state's eastern shore, where novelist John Barth has reigned for years, we find a new talent, Christopher Tilghman, centering his writings on those waterways.

Down the interstate from Baltimore is the U.S. capital. Washington may appear, to readers, to enjoy a special place in American fiction, given the number of plots of popular political and global suspense adventures that either unfold there or find their way there in the course of the tale. But they are not true Washington novels. More worthy of the title are the writings of Ward Just, a onetime international correspondent who switched to a second career, creating in fiction the world he knows best -- populated by journalists, congressmen, diplomats and military figures -- and focusing not on political machinations or world crises, but on emotional nuances and psychological effect.

Moving past Richmond, Virginia, scene of the crimes in which mystery novelist Patricia Cornwell's protagonist, medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, is enmeshed, we reach North Carolina. This state is home to Algonquin Books and to a rich literary tradition that boasts, among others, Thomas Wolfe. More recently, Reynolds Price, Anne Tyler's mentor, has been described by a critic as holding the obsolescent post of "Southern-writer-in-residence," although others of the period were also worthy of the title. Concentrating on the people and land of eastern North Carolina, Price wrote several books about a young woman named Rosacoke Mustian, then shifted his focus to other themes before returning to a female protagonist in 1986. Jill McCorkle, still in her 30s, represents the newest generation of North Carolina writers. Setting her novels and short stories largely in the small towns of the state, she has focused on subjects ranging from the mystique of teenagers in America's heartland to the particular sensibilities of contemporary Southern women. The lore and history of the southern Appalachians are central to the homespun fiction of Lee Smith, while the sensitive antennae of Clyde Edgerton -- a Mark Twain for our day -- are tuned in to Carolinians ripe for satire. If Edgerton is in the Twain mold, then T.R. Pearson is this generation's Faulkner -- with Neely, North Carolina, replacing Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.

South Carolina was placed on the map by Pat Conroy. His bracing autobiographical novels about his household -- dominated by his tyrannical, often abusive father -- are awash in ambivalence, as downbeat themes about his dysfunctional family are countered by the lush descriptions of the natural beauty of the Low Country, on the nation's eastern coast. Even before confronting the lingering sores of his home life and schooling, however, he wrote a beautiful work of nonfiction, The Water Is Wide. In it, he described his experiences as a young, untested schoolteacher working with impoverished children on a barrier island off the Carolinas.

The midwestern U.S. heartland continues to produce a wealth of writing talent, heirs to Willa Cather and Eudora Welty -- and to rugged urban literati like Saul Bellow as well. If urban literature is somewhat in repose these days, Chicago writers like Scott Turow -- whose legal dramas have set a standard for much of the genre -- and Stuart Dybek -- author of fiction rooted in the city's ethnic environs -- are keeping the city on the literary map. Jane Smiley, who teaches writing at the University of Iowa, is prominent among the rural talents. Before skewering academic life in her most recent book, Moo, she won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for A Thousand Acres, a transplant of Shakespeare's King Lear to contemporary America. It chronicles the bitter family feud unleashed when an aging farmer decides to turn his land over to his three daughters. Not far away, Louise Erdrich, part Chippewa Indian, has written some powerful pieces of fiction set in North Dakota, homing in on the tangled lives of Native American families. She is one of the progenitors of a younger group of Native American writers on the plains and in the West that includes Susan Power, Linda Hogan and Sherman Alexie.

In a more popular vein, Larry McMurtry, a fixture of the bestseller lists, has borne witness to the perambulations of Texas history, from the frontier to the freeway, and, as his characters shift their bases to Las Vegas and Hollywood, he changes his settings as well. Meantime, Texas' ethnic side is being given strong voice by Sandra Cisneros. Her short fiction, collected in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories , about Mexican Americans in San Antonio and other border communities dovetails neatly with her first anthology, The House on Mango Street, centered on a young Hispanic-American girl in Chicago.

Another "border" writer worth noting is Douglas C. Jones, one of the nation's most underrated novelists. He has masterfully traced the westward push -- and disappearance -- of the frontier in a series of profoundly evocative novels centering mostly on one family, tracing its lives from the mid-19th century to the 1930s, across a stretch of land from Tennessee to the Continental Divide (the Rocky Mountains). Other Southern writers of note include Bobbie Ann Mason -- one of the more rooted chroniclers of contemporary family life in the state of Kentucky -- and Mississippi's Lewis Nordan, a discovery of Algonquin Books, whose novels are principally linked to the U.S. Civil War and the advent of integration.

The land straddling the Rockies has become a fertile literary tract. Cormac McCarthy can be found there, exploring the U.S. Southwest in several of his novels after transplanting himself from Tennessee. This reclusive writer with a limitless imagination has only gotten his due in the marketplace in the past several years. Generally considered the rightful heir to the Southern Gothic tradition, McCarthy is as intrigued by the wildness of the terrain as he is by human savagery and unpredictability. Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko, born and raised in New Mexico, has gained a large general audience through her fiction, particularly The Almanac of the Dead. It offers a panorama of the region, from ancient tribal migrations to present-day drug runners and corrupt real estate developers reaping profits by misusing the land (a theme frequently explored by mystery writer Carl Hiaasen with Florida as a backdrop). It is a perfect complement to the thrillers of Tony Hillerman, of Santa Fe, whose detective stories feature two low-key Navajo policemen as protagonists. John Nichols, with affection, good humor and intelligence, has treated the cultural heritage and sensibilities of ethnic New Mexico in a lauded trilogy, including, most notably, The Milagro Beanfield War.

And Hispanic-American novelist-poet Rudolfo Anaya adds themes of mysticism and spirituality to the literature of this region.

Something about Montana, to the north, must be special to produce such a rich and diverse lode of writing talent. The rugged fictive narratives of Ivan Doig, including a family trilogy, center on what he describes as "the westering expanse of this continent." His books, such as English Creek and Dancing at the Rascal Fair, are complemented by the minimalist fiction and nonfiction writings of Rick Bass, which revolve around mountains and wilderness, and the disaffected, rootless antiheroes of Thomas McGuane's novels. Add to these writers Native American poet-novelist James Welch, who details the struggles of the members of his ethnic group to find meaning within the historical tensions in their lives.

For decades, two writers personified the Far West, specifically California. Wallace Stegner, an Iowa native, spent the bulk of his life in various locales between the Rockies and the Pacific Ocean. He had a regional outlook even before it was in vogue, and many writers today look to him as their progenitor/mentor. His first major work, The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), chronicles a family caught up in the American Dream in its Western sensibility in the aftermath of the disappearance of the frontier. The epic ranges from Minnesota in the Midwest to the state of Washington in the Northwest, and concerns itself with "that place of impossible loveliness that pulled the whole nation westward," in Stegner's words. In 1972, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose, a reflection of the spirit of place in the personality of a woman illustrator and chronicler of the Old West. Stegner's untimely death in an automobile accident in 1993 robbed American literature of an artist in his productive golden years. Complementing Stegner over time has been Joan Didion, journalist and novelist, who put contemporary California on the map in her 1968 nonfiction volume, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and in her incisive, shocking 1971 novel about the aimlessness of the Hollywood scene, Play It As It Lays. But she has moved to other areas of interest in recent books. Her role as a California writer has been partly assumed by several younger talents, among them Lisa See -- who has recorded the turbulent history of Asian migration to California and the West Coast -- and two mystery writers, Sue Grafton, who conveys the sense of languor of the beach communities of present-day southern California, and Walter Mosley, whose African American detective hero probes his cases against the tapestry of post-World War II Los Angeles. Then, too, other ethnics, specifically Asian-Americans Amy Tan and Fae Myenne Ng and (with an East Coast setting) Gish Jen and Chang-Rae Lee use "place" as the background for explorations of their hyphenated status.

Far to the northwest, in Oregon and Washington, a spirit of place abides in the writings of naturalist Barry Lopez and novelist/essayist David Guterson. Guterson, in fact, has become something of a cult favorite, with the continuing success of his first novel, Snow Falling on Cedars, a study of the events surrounding a murder trial of a Japanese-American fisherman on a remote island off the coast of the state of Washington. And Sherman Alexie, who finds great joy and enchantment in his Native American tradition, has been tabbed as one of the more promising young writers of today. And way offshore, Hawaii's literary expansion is apparent in the works of Garrett Hongo - particularly his memoir, Volcano - and the offbeat fiction of Lois-Ann Yamanaka.

Two parallel literary forms rooted today in "place" deserve mention. The linkage of one -- poetry -- to that sensibility is inherent in the art form. Poets have minimal time to gain readers' attention, as opposed to writers of fiction or nonfiction, who enjoy the luxuries of paragraphs and pages. And so a sense of place, where appropriate, invariably comes into play. In the past, the United States boasted of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg; today, the roster of poets attuned to "place" includes Amy Clampitt, W.S. Merwin and Gary Snyder.

Drama, though, is a more interesting case in point. To a significant degree, the expansion of the sense of place in contemporary theater can be directly attributed to the growth of the regional theater movement. These nonprofit institutional companies that have become centers of culture on the urban and suburban scene, mostly since the mid-1960s, have the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts -- and expanded corporate support -- to thank. And with the establishment of first-rate troupes outside the traditional New York City hub -- in places like New Haven and Hartford, Connecticut, and Louisville, Kentucky -- a parallel surfacing of gifted young dramatists has transpired. One wonders what American theater, and literature, would be like today without the coruscating fragmented society depicted in the works of Sam Shepard, the monosyllabic, staccato Chicago street talk of David Mamet, the range of 20th-century life experienced by the heroes and heroines of August Wilson's continuing play cycle, the introspective glimpses into Midwestern lives and concerns reflected by Lanford Wilson, and the Southern eccentricities of Beth Henley. Whereas their progenitors - Eugene O'Neill, William Inge and Tennessee Williams - directed their plays at the centralized theater audience of New York City, the newer dramatists are shaped and nurtured within their regions and others before facing that alien urban stage.

So many writers are bringing their own uncommon impressions to American literature. They are impassioned as they describe and analyze, for readers the world over, what they see on the surface of and beneath the landscape, and beyond the horizon. Literally and figuratively, they are bringing new hues, new perspectives and new meaning, through literature, to the places in their hearts across the United States.