(FINANCIAL TIMES) - Delaware can reasonably claim to be the most innocuous state in the United States. The tax-advantageous peninsula seldom incurs hatred, its opposite, or even a second thought from those outside its nearly one million residents.

Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club, in which a man seeks deliverance from a life of desk-bound averageness, has Wilmington, its largest city, as an implied setting.