The Roundup

In 1980, the Beat writer William S. Burroughs gave a public reading at the Centennial Planetarium, in Calgary. Eight years later, another counterculture icon, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, attended a gala as part of the Olympic Writers Festival. In 2009, the humorist David Sedaris grabbed one of those famous milkshakes at Peters’ Drive-In. Spider-Man once attended the Stampede, as did Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. And when he stopped in Calgary for “one lively half-hour” in 1907, Rudyard Kipling declared it “the wonder city of Canada.”

These and other tenuous associations with Cowtown are captured in A Literary Map of Calgary, a new interactive exhibit curated by the local public library’s outgoing historian-in-residence, Shaun Hunter. To be sure, the online map, which seeks to capture “the extensive and surprising dimensions of Calgary’s literary landscape,” charts...