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ARTS & CULTURE

Great road trips in american literature.

From Twain to Kerouac to Bryson, writers have found inspiration in hitting the road and traveling the United States

Abby Callard

John Steinbeck declares in Travels With Charley that Americans descended from those who moved: those who left Europe, those who were forced to leave Africa, and those who came in search of a better life. It makes sense that we would be travelers. “Every American hungers to move,” he writes. But most of us can’t just pack up and leave, so here are 11 books about American road trips for those who can’t break away from life’s commitments.

Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain, 1872 and 1883, respectively

Perhaps the standard-bearer for translating the American spirit to paper, Mark Twain wrote two separate accounts of traveling through the country. First, in 1872, he provides a fictionalized account of when he went West to ostensibly be personal secretary to his brother, who had been appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory. Twain’s ulterior motive? Searching for fabled gold. In a somewhat fictionalized account of this period, Twain recounts his time as a frontier newspaper reporter, a prospector, and a writer.

Twain’s second memoir recounts his career as a steamboat captain on the Mississippi River in the years before the Civil War. Twain used his rambunctious childhood in Missouri as the basis for many novels, but this book tells his personal biography in more detail. Years later, Twain returns to navigate the same river, and is struck by how industrialization has changed the cities along the river.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac, 1957 When this semi-autobiographical work was published, the New York Times hailed it as the “most important utterance” by anyone from the Beat Generation. Though he changed the names, the characters in the novel have real life counterparts. Salvatore “Sal” Paradise (Kerouac) from New York City meets Dean Moriarty (fellow beatnik Neal Cassady) on a cross-country journey fueled by drugs, sex and poetry The novel’s protagonists crisscross the United States and venture into Mexico on three separate trips that reveal much about the character of the epic hero, Moriarty, and the narrator.

Black Like Me John Howard Griffin, 1961 To document the African American experience in the South during the 1950s, John Howard Griffin, a white journalist, artificially darkened his skin using medication and UV lamps. He spoke as little as possible and maintained his name and biography. The only thing that has changed was the color of his skin. He traveled through Louisiana, Alabama and Georgia discovering the nuances of race relations in the segregated South. The reaction was varied: Griffin was hanged in effigy in his Texas hometown, but many recognized the book, which sold 10 million copies and was translated into 14 languages, as an important step in human rights activism.

Travels With Charley John Steinbeck, 1962 Near the end of his career, John Steinbeck set out to rediscover the country he had made a living writing about. With only his French poodle Charley as company, he embarked on a three-month journey across most of the continental United States. On his way, he meets the terse residents of Maine, falls in love with Montana and watches desegregation protests in New Orleans. Although Steinbeck certainly came to his own conclusions on his journey, he respects individual experience: He saw what he saw and knows that anyone else would have seen something different.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, 1968 Young writer Ken Kesey led a group of LSD-using hippies called the Merry Pranksters around the country in a painted bus in the 1960s. Wolfe combines original reporting with creative writing techniques to both cover the reality of the journey and the hallucinogenic experiences of the characters. The cast reads like a who’s who of counter-culture: Bob Dylan, Neal Cassady, Hunter S. Thompson, Doctor Strange and Jerry Garcia. The book remains one of the most intimate and well-respected testaments to hippie subculture.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson, 1971 What many consider the quintessential drug-induced book of the 1970s was an amalgam of two magazine assignments, one from Rolling Stone and the other from Sports Illustrated . Reporting on the Los Angeles murder of journalist Ruben Salazar, Thompson decided that the best way to mine good material out of his source, political activist Oscar Zeta Acosta, was to take to the open road and drive to Las Vegas. But when they got there, their intentions turned to drugs, alcohol and gambling. Ever the enterprising reporter, Thompson also took a respite from his highs to take on a caption-writing assignment to cover an off-road desert race for Sports Illustrated . Although the loose narrative blurs the line between reality and what the characters are merely imagining, a sharp critique of American culture permeates the pages.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974 A deep, philosophical book that masquerades as a simple story of a father-and-son motorcycle trip, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is Pirsig’s first foray into philosophy writing. Their motorcycle trip from Minneapolis to San Francisco is also a trip through Eastern and Western philosophical traditions. His friend, a romantic, lives by the principle of Zen and relies on mechanics to fix his motorcycle. Pirisg, on the other hand, leaves nothing up to chance and knows the ins and outs of maintaining his bike.

Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon, 1982 After losing his wife and job as a professor, William Least Heat-Moon sets out on a soul-searching journey across the United States. He avoids large cities and interstates, choosing to travel only on “blue” highways—so called for their color in the Rand McNally Road Atlas. Along the way, he meets and records conversations with a born-again Christian hitchhiker, an Appalachian log cabin restorer, a Nevada prostitute and a Hopi Native American medical student.

Mississippi Solo by Eddy L. Harris, 1988 Harris was 30 years old when he wrote his memoir of a journey down the length of the Mississippi River, from Minnesota to New Orleans, in a canoe. His discussion of racial issues, a focus of the book, is shaped by his experience of moving from Harlem to suburban St. Louis 20 years earlier. Along the way Harris meets a spectrum of people, forcing him to reassess his preconceived ideas about whom he would encounter on the trip.

The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson, 1989 Prolific travel writer Bill Bryson returns to the United States after two decades in England to search for the perfect American small town. But Bryson finds an America unlike the place he idealizes. In a Chevy Chevette he borrows from his mother, Bryson drives through 38 states eschewing the big city and luxury hotels befitting this famed journalist.

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Abby Callard is an assistant editor at Milwaukee Magazine.

The Best Travel Literature of All Time

Like many travellers, you may have found yourself immersed in the voyages of those who have gone before you from time to time. While living vicariously is no replacement for being on the road, there are some utterly wonderful nonfiction travel books out there, which are the next best thing.

A Time of Gifts by Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

It’s quite genuinely impossible to create a comprehensive list of the best travel literature. While there’s a lot of replication of these types of lists out there, some books endure precisely because of their importance at the time or to other writers. Although some authors listed below deserve to have more than one of their books featured on this compendium of the greatest travel literature, only their finest work has been included. Consider it your gateway to that writer’s greater oeuvre, if you’ve not read any of their work previously; a reminder if you have. Similarly, non-male writers have often been unfortunately overlooked in the past and some real gems that deserve to be on the best travel literature of all-time lists have been overlooked.

The following aims to redress the balance a little. Consideration is also given to some of the works that defined people who are now better-known for their other exploits, because there’s no greater adventure than that of somebody whose travels inspired them to do something more important or lasting in the world beyond merely moving through space and time for travel’s sake. Here are twenty of the best pieces of travel literature ever written (theoretically), to guide you to your next read, to find inspiration for your next trip, or to simply use as a general reading checklist until your next journey.

A Time of Gifts (1977) – Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor

Writing about Paddy Leigh Fermor in 2020, it would be easy to dismiss the great writer as a privileged individual who was fortunate to stay with royalty and the well-to-do all across Europe as he sauntered from one place to the next. But that would be an awful disservice. A Time of Gifts is the first of a trilogy of books documenting his journey, on foot, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (Istanbul). His scholarship and complete immersion in every culture he encountered helped his writing transcend mere travel literature to reach a higher level of writing. You never feel as though he’s an outside observer trying to make sense of the foreign by superimposing his own beliefs. His prose has been described as baroque, and is densely layered with a deep intelligence, understanding and, above all, passion for everything he encounters. The trip itself was undertaken in 1933/4 and the Europe that Fermor uncovers on his peregrinations is one which is beginning to spiral blindly into major conflict. Somehow this aspect makes the random acts of kindness he experiences across Germany and the rest of the continent even more bittersweet.

Publisher: John Murray, Buy at Amazon.com

Arabian Sands (1959) – Sir Wilfred Thesiger

Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger (Photo: courtesy of P.S. Burton via Wikimedia Commons)

Another travel literature classic is Thesiger’s intrepid anthropological look at Bedouin culture and lifestyle in one of the remotest, most inhospitable places on earth: the Arabian Peninsula’s Rub’ al Khali. The setting for the journey is amid the embers of World War II, the repercussions of which were being felt worldwide, including among the Bedouin tribes who’d lived much in the same way they always had until the outside world intruded. In effect, this book offers a snapshot of a remarkable culture that was fast altering, which is what makes this, and many of the books written during the reign of the British Empire, fascinating historical documents. For all of the rightful condemnation of European colonialism, one thing is clear in this book: the fascination and inquisitive nature of the many British scholarly individuals sent to far-reaching corners of the globe created an immensely valuable cache of first-person accounts of cultures and peoples that may not have been recorded otherwise amid the inevitable and inescapable rise of globalisation of the time.

Publisher: Penguin Classics, Buy at Amazon.com

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942) – Rebecca West

West’s voluminous, in-depth examination of Yugoslavia during her time travelling there in 1937 was designed to explore how the country was a reflection of its past. West spent six weeks journeying across the whole region with her husband and meeting eminent citizens along the way. Sadly, by the time the book was published, the Nazis had invaded and the country would never be the same again, which makes this yet another invaluable early-20 th -century document. What sets Black Lamb and Grey Falcon apart though is the level of exquisite detail and research dedicated to the subject. If there was any proof required that travel literature serves an invaluable purpose as a piece of primary historical evidence, then this may well be it.

Publisher: Canongate Books, Buy at Amazon.com

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Border (2017) – Kapka Kassabova

Beautifully written and layered with a real sense of atmosphere, Kassabova’s haunting Border is one of the standout pieces of travel writing to be published in the last decade. Eastern Europe is one of the least explored regions of the world in travel literature. Owing perhaps in part to the secrecy and legacy of distrust brought about by the Cold War, even those who have travelled through as part of longer journeys (Paul Theroux in Pillars of Hercules or Bill Bryson in Neither Here Nor There ) scarcely shed any real light on the region. Here, Kassabova heads back to the nation of her birth (Bulgaria) to explore the fragments of political ideology, faith and race, and the blurred lines between them, that have developed around the border region separating Bulgaria from Greece and Turkey.

Publisher: Granta Books, Buy at Amazon.com

Border by Kapka Kasabova (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) – George Orwell

While much of travel literature is concerned with the voyage and seeking out the miraculous, the unique and the lesser known, Orwell took another route entirely. Down and Out in Paris and London does exactly what it says on the tin. It is a memoir of impoverished living in two of the world’s great cities, at a time when they were global beacons in terms of both power and culture. Not only does this book, in a very prescient move, eschew the superior tone of academia when examining the other, it also avoids all glamour in those cities, focussing entirely on the poor, the meek and the desperate. In Paris he lives on the edge of eviction, working the kitchens of a fancy establishment, while in London he lives the life of a tramp, moving from one bunkhouse and soup kitchen to the next, living day to day. It is to travel writing what the ‘method’ is to acting.

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972) – Hunter S. Thompson

The outlier on this list (all good lists need one) is Hunter S. Thompson’s delightfully absurd, occasionally apocryphal and downright debauched novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas . In it, he created a new way of writing known as gonzo journalism, a style of storytelling which is found most commonly today in some documentaries, where the lines of fact and fiction become blurred and with the journalist placed as a central character in the story. This brilliant commentary on the flexible and inconsistent nature of truth was perfectly epitomised by the increasingly hallucinogenic recollections of protagonist Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo. The road trip to Las Vegas ultimately casts important light on an American society gripped by racism and violence (partly why the story is still so powerful today is that America hasn’t yet learned to grow up). As such it remains one of the most intriguing snapshots of America out there, surpassing the work of many strait-laced travel narratives in the process.

Publisher: Random House Inc., Buy at Amazon.com

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson (Photo: Mathieu Croisetière via Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (1975) – Paul Theroux

A perfect example of how gonzo journalism began to seep into travel literature comes from what is arguably the most important modern travelogue: The Great Railway Bazaar . In it, Theroux travels from London all the way to Southeast Asia and Japan, via India, then back to Europe via Russia’s Trans-Siberian railway. While Theroux upholds elements of the old school travel narrative – like the scholarly, studious approach and the inquisitive air – his journey by train is as much about the growing backpacker, hippie, trail and the western counterculture that encouraged it. Occasionally the line between fact and fiction is blurred in his writing, but only to better convey his interactions with the people he met. As such, you get a fascinating look at what could be called modern colonialism, whereby the train networks that were often built by colonial rulers in non-European nations across the world, like India and Burma, were now being used by a new generation in the post-colonial era to explore these newly-sovereign nations.

In Patagonia (1977) – Bruce Chatwin

Coming hot on the tail of Theroux’s above book is perhaps the most popular and enduring travel book of all time: In Patagonia . Bruce Chatwin starts it off with a direct nod to writing and journalism’s slide into apocrypha by framing his trip loosely around the search for remains of a “brontosaurus” found in a Patagonian cave, which he first found languishing in his grandparent’s house. The doubtful story behind this find sets him on a road where he aim to unravel various other mysteries whose only connection is geographical, including the final resting place of Butch Cassady and the Sundance Kid, in the wild, empty spaces of South America. It’s a brilliant book formed of loose sections that don’t directly link to one another but has greatly influenced modern travel literature today.

Publisher: Vintage Classics, Buy at Amazon.com

In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

In Xanadu (1989) – William Dalrymple

One of the travel writers greatly influenced by Chatwin was William Dalrymple, whose own quest for his first book, In Xanadu , was framed as a search for the fabled palace of Kublai Khan, Xanadu. This type of narrative has always proven to be a ready source of inspiration for some of the better modern travel books; searching for answers to popular mysteries. It has a journalistic bent to it, and manages to sidestep the awkwardness of westerners merely travelling abroad and casting aspersions about the people and cultures they encounter through an imperial gaze, as is the criticism often lodged again some of the earlier works of travel writing. Here, Dalrymple follows in the footsteps of Marco Polo (following footsteps of somebody famous is also a common trope of travel literature) to find the palace. While Dalrymple restores elements of the scholarly, learned approach common to writers like Robert Byron and Paddy Leigh Fermor, you can feel the impact of those 70s writers as well.

Publisher: Flamingo, Buy at Amazon.com

In Xanadu by William Dalrymple (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Into the Wild (1996) – Jon Krakauer

Few gripping travel narratives manage to capture the why? of our impulse to roam quite like Jon Krakauer does in Into the Wild . The book is both harrowing and revelatory, while performing a third-person character study on a young man he never actually met. In 1992 Chris McCandless walked into the Alaskan wilderness and never came back out. The book tries to examine what had led him there in the first place, whether he’d intended to return at all, and why he wasn’t the first to try and cut all ties with modern society. Krakauer looks to others, such as Henry David Thoreau ( Walden is the original escape from society book and a must-read for anybody fascinated by this subject), who successfully parted from the rat race, as well as the reasons McCandless initially fled from well-to-do family life years before and never contacted them again in his search for something more profound and meaningful. While most readers may disagree with McCandless’s methods, his motives seem far more familiar and relatable.

Publisher: Pan Macmillan, Buy at Amazon.com

The Living Mountain (1977) – Nan Shepherd

Perhaps one of the finest pieces of nature writing ever committed to paper is The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd. Sadly, it’s also one of the most underrated books. The research for her book was undertaken in and around 1942, during the Second World War, which didn’t trouble the wilds of Scotland too badly. Here, the stark beauty of the Cairngorms seems to mirror the harsh reality of war. But Shepherd’s deep examination of the various microcosms of life that thrive on the region’s mountains is really a poem that exalts life. It’s a celebration of survival and endurance. Her wonderful book almost never made it to print, lying in a drawer for decades until a friend read it and encouraged her to seek out a publisher. We’re lucky it did.

The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

The Motorcycle Diaries (1992) – Che Guevara

Even if Che Guevara never became the revolutionary and icon of a generation that he did, The Motorcycle Diaries is a fascinating first-person account of travel’s capacity to broaden the mind. The young medic Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara sets out from his home in Buenos Aires with his friend Alberto Granado sharing a motorcycle ‘La Poderosa’ and in his pointed recollections, you can almost feel Che’s ideological shift. He sees poverty and pain and beauty in the poor communities they visit, and through this, we learn a lot about how Guevara became a key player in the Cuban Revolution. But it’s also a beautiful rumination about the paths we take in life and the importance of curiosity.

Publisher: Perennial, Buy at Amazon.com

Notes from a Small Island (1995) – Bill Bryson

You can’t really write a top travel literature list and omit Bill Bryson. He’s one of the finest travel writers still producing books. Notes from a Small Island is particularly intriguing because, while most of the books that make any top travel literature list tend to be written by Brits, this is a book about Britain, written by an American. And it’s a delightfully observed book at that, pinpointing the eccentricities and unusual aspects of the island nation that most Brits would never think twice about, but when seen through foreign eyes suddenly become absurd. Bryson is especially gifted at making even the most mundane things seem funny. His books neatly balance thorough research and scholarship with humour and keen observation, effectively amalgamating all of the key aspects of travel literature into one inimitable style.

Publisher: Black Swan, Buy at Amazon.com

Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson (Photo: Wolf Gang via Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0)

On the Road (1957) – Jack Kerouac

Before modern travel literature’s more self-aware phase that started in the 1970s, we had what essentially kick-started the great 20 th -century American cultural upheaval: The Beat Movement. Kerouac was writing about sexual promiscuity, wanton drug use and giving the establishment the middle finger way before it was cool to do so. Well-educated and moving in New York’s literary circles, Kerouac’s thinly-veiled characters in On the Road (substituting Old Bull Lee for William S. Burroughs, Dean Moriarty for Neal Cassady, Carlo Marx for Allen Ginsberg, and Sal Paradise for himself) are painted into a quasi-fictional account of his cross-country jaunts in the late 1940s. The post-war world was much-changed; the white picket fence America with its Jim Crow segregation and uptight Bible-belt hypocrisy were no longer acceptable. Around the same time, J.D. Salinger was branding it phoney, while Kerouac was realising this in his own way, by embracing escapism and drugs. On the Road still resonates today; both the book and the Beats gave licence to a generation of youths to question the oppressive system that became all too obvious in the 60s.

On The Road by Jack Kerouac (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

The Road to Oxiana (1937) – Robert Byron

Much of the Afghanistan and Iran of Byron’s writing has disappeared, making the precision of his prose all the more valuable. The Road to Oxiana has all the classic elements of earlier travel narratives in it, scholarship, keen observation but also the kind of humour and casual presentation that would become far more popular in the writing styles common to the latter half of the 20 th century. Byron’s constant use of Marjoribanks to replace the name of the Persian ruler of the time was designed to evade censure or punishment in case his notebooks were confiscated and read. The humour of this rebelliousness is not lost when read today, even if some of his style may feel a little bit dated now. His architectural descriptions may be among some of the finest in all of travel literature.

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Rome and a Villa (1952) – Eleanor Clark

Because the majority of travel writing is crafted around a voyage or quest of some sort, we expect the movement to transcend places, countries even. What Clark does exceptionally well in Rome and a Villa is offer an in-depth depiction of just one city: Rome. This book, although not particularly tied to or crafted around any one specific idea, offers a deeper understanding of The Eternal City based on Clark’s explorations, often on foot. Indeed, her scholarly treatment of the Italian capital brings the city’s rich, storied past to life in imaginative and illuminating ways that offer fresh insight on a place that we may easily think has already been well covered already. Which goes to show that places change with the times offering an opportunity for fresh perspectives. There’s nowhere that is dull or too well-known in travel writing if handled by the right scribe.

Publisher: Harper Perennial, Buy at Amazon.com

Shadow of the Silk Road (2007) – Colin Thubron

Colin Thubron’s fascination with worlds that are ostensibly closed off to westerners has often led him into places that many others wouldn’t think to go. He visited China before it had opened up to the world, and the same goes for Soviet Russia. In Shadow of the Silk Road Thubron exhibits why his books are perhaps the most masterfully crafted of all contemporary travel literature. His pacing and descriptive writing are exquisite, particularly in this book, in which he journeys from Xi’an to Antakya in Turkey following the old ways, through Central Asia, once known as the Silk Road. The worlds he uncovers and the people he meets are painstakingly woven into a rich text, much like a hand-woven Persian rug, that is one of the most evocative pieces of travel writing out there.

Publisher: Vintage, Buy at Amazon.com

Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Travels with Myself and Another (1979) – Martha Gellhorn

Even if Martha Gellhorn was writing today, she would rightly be upheld as one of the great journalists, but given that she was doing it decades ago, often better than her counterparts in a male-dominated field, is even more remarkable. The ‘Another’ that accompanies Gellhorn through much of the book was her former husband Ernest Hemingway, but the book also includes memoir from Africa in which she voyages solo. The book is presented as a collection of essays, a format that has become increasingly common in travel writing and which effectively allows the book to focus on more than one topic. Gellhorn’s writing includes keen observation, lively wit and a really sharp political outlook.

Publisher: Eland Publishing Ltd., Buy at Amazon.com

The Valleys of the Assassins (1934) – Freya Stark

Stark was an incredible human being. Fluent in numerous languages, including Farsi, she travelled the world often alone at a time when even men undertaking such journeys were considered intrepid. Stark was particularly drawn to the Middle East and was able to recount the stories of the women there, living in devout Muslim communities, in a way no man would ever have been able to do. She also discovered regions that had not been explored by Westerners before, including the Valley of the Assassins, which forms the basis of this eponymous book, receiving the Royal Geographical Society’s prestigious Back Award in the process. She continued to write books well into her 90s (releasing work over six decades) and died in Italy at the age of 100.

Publisher: Modern Library Inc., Buy at Amazon.com

Wild by Cheryl Strayed (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2012) – Cheryl Strayed

Some may question this popular book’s inclusion on a list of the all-time greats, but it really has all the ingredients of a classic exploration of the human psyche. The physical duress that Strayed experienced on her hike of the Pacific Crest Trail (which runs from California’s border with Mexico to Washington’s border with Canada), and the gradual loss of her toenails as a result, is depicted with visceral precision. Her self-inflicted pain mirrors the mental health and dependency issues that plagued her before embarking on the feat, and in the process, we discover the restorative power of travel, of meeting new people and of forcing ourselves to step beyond our comfortably-positioned boundaries. Like any good travel literature, this book sheds light on why travel is so addictive, powerful and pertinent. Just like all the other books on this list, you’ll finish it wanting to plan your next trip.

Publisher: Atlantic Books, Buy at Amazon.com

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What the End of The Best American Travel Writing Says About Travel Writing—And About America

Thomas swick on the uncertain future of a durable genre.

Every fall for the last 22 years has seen the arrival of The Best American Travel Writing , part of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s series of anthologies that include, among others, The Best American Essays and The Best American Short Stories . The inaugural edition in 2000 was inexplicably late—coming a good decade after the close of travel writing’s heyday—but nevertheless welcome in a genre that, unlike food writing, never had a widely recognized prize. Being included in The Best American Travel Writing was worth half a dozen Lowell Thomas awards. Plus, it gave your story a second life between covers.

Those first anthologies were thick hardcovers that eventually devolved into thin paperbacks. The 2001 edition, guest edited by Paul Theroux, had 418 pages; this year’s, with Padma Lakshmi in the guest editor’s chair, had 265. Admittedly, 2020 was not a good year for travel writing, but the very existence of The Best American Travel Writing 2021 is a testament to the resilience and adaptability of the genre.

The genre is more durable than the series, which the publisher, now part of HarperCollins, has decided to discontinue after this year. The move is based not on a drop in travel writing’s quality, or even quantity, but rather its increasing inability to attract a large audience (which explains the marquee guest editor this year). Series editor Jason Wilson, in an interview with Jeremy Bassetti on the podcast Travel Writing World, said that recent editions didn’t sell nearly as well as early editions had. This includes The Best American Travel Writing 2020 , which came out in the middle of a pandemic (with stories written before it)—the perfect moment, one would think, for armchair travel.

Travel writing is not the only series to fall victim to indifference— The Best American Sports Writing was discontinued after last year’s edition (prompting Triumph Books to come out this fall with The Year’s Best Sports Writing )—but this blow is particularly disheartening for a genre that has gradually and, for those of us who love it, mystifyingly lost its allure.

Granted, it has suffered its share of attacks in recent years. Critics have flagged it with the taint of neo-colonialism and accused it of cultural appropriation, but they have mostly been academics, who don’t exert great influence on the reading public. And they have been answered eloquently by people like Colin Thubron, who, in an interview in the Financial Times , noted that, far from wishing to “impose” themselves, most travel writers try to understand, and learn from, the countries they visit. “If you regard every relationship as a power relationship,” he cautioned, “you descend into paranoia.”

The genre has even received criticism from within its own ranks, as some travel writers have questioned the time-honored goal of “traveling like a local,” finding it self-delusional and, if taken literally, counterproductive—the argument being that most people, even those residing in stellar locales, lead lives of boring repetition, what the French have summarized as “ métro, boulot, dodo .” Never mind that a detailed account of subway commuting, Parisian office politics (think Call My Agent! ), and, well, not sleep, but French home life would paint a more accurate and amusing portrait of the capital than a story on museums and Michelin-starred restaurants.

A greater contributor to travel writing’s drop in popularity is of course the Internet, that infinite, ever-expanding archive of everything. Google your destination and it appears on your screen, in words and pictures. Who needs travel writers, one might ask, when hundreds of bloggers are typing their findings, thousands of tourists are posting their videos, millions of vacationers are sending their tweets?

Yet most people go to the Internet for information, not insight, or what John Cheever called “a page of good prose”—both of which fine travel writers provide. They too can be found online—it’s where I read the Thubron interview—but they’re not prominent residents there. The Internet, at least the non-pictorial part, is more about utility than it is about pleasure.

One of the main reasons readers of travel writing have faded away—in this country, anyway—is   the decades-long trend of America turning inward. The genre still does well in the UK, where one publisher, Eland Books, specializes in reprints of travel classics. But the United Kingdom is a small island (with a long travel writing tradition) at the edge of a large and influential continent; the United States is a behemoth unto itself.

That travel writing ever had a golden age here may seem a bit strange, but publishers in the 1980s—excited by the successes of Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar and Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia —competed with each other over travel books; a few started imprints devoted entirely to them. Jan Morris wrote penetrating portraits of places for Rolling Stone and Banana Republic came out with a short-lived travel magazine, Trips , that was sold in its stores’ slightly longer-lived travel bookshops. For writers starting out in the ’80s, travel writing appeared as a promising career.

But soon the travel book was eclipsed by the memoir. Its reign produced its own instant classics—Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life , Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club —and suggested a growing fascination with the personal and the familial. This preoccupation grew even stronger after 9/11, an event that, instead of motivating us to become more globally aware, somehow made us even more introspective. The new century brought a slew of memoirs about common human experiences: illness, grief, dysfunction, abuse, addiction. Joan Didion, who in the ’80s wrote Salvador and Miami (focusing on the city’s Cuban exile community), published books about the deaths of her husband and daughter. It was a natural turn for an aging author, but it felt like an official confirmation of our retreat from the world into the self.

Immigrant memoirs have appeared—like Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee and Phuc Tran’s Sigh, Gone —giving us outsiders’ views of our home ( enough about us, what do you think about us? ), but there has been no corresponding wave of books about Americans abroad. This has at least kept at a minimum vapid accounts of idylls in Tuscany and Provence. And the number of published books that are works of translation has stayed at a dismal three percent. The general feeling among publishers is that most people would rather identify with what they read than learn about something outside their own experience. And in a country where less than half of the population owns a passport, this means concentrating on the personal and the parochial.

Yet our self-absorbed republic is producing more world travelers than ever; back in travel writing’s heyday, less than 10 percent of Americans had passports. So despite our solipsistic tendencies—or actually owing to them—travel writing theoretically should be enjoying a boom, especially when you consider that travelers and readers are often one in the same.

But like the Internet, travel’s growth has created the impression that travel writer is a superannuated profession—the Age of Overtourism’s blacksmith. Together, the two modern developments have created a world in which everything is accessible and almost nothing seems foreign. Why should people depend on some stranger’s impressions of a country when they can go out and gather their own? Unfortunately, few of them bring to their journeys the preparation and research, the knowledge and experience, the perceptive eye and the analytical mind and the inquisitive spirit of a gifted travel writer.

What’s especially frustrating about the decline in popularity of travel writing is that it has never been better, thanks in part to technology, one of the forces that seems to work against it. Seeing the increase in the number of travelers, and their easy access to the Internet, travel writers realized that it was no longer enough just to describe a place, or meet its inhabitants; they had to excavate its meanings. As a result, the work they produced became richer, deeper, and infinitely more expansive. And, in many cases, it borrowed elements from the memoir.

This approach was not new; V.S. Naipaul brought history, analysis, and introspection (three words not usually associated with blogging) to his first travel book, The Middle Passage , in 1962. Jonathan Raban used the same tools for Old Glory and Hunting Mister Heartbreak , two books that, because they’re about the U.S., show us better than most the educational and entertainment value of the canny observer. More recently, writers as diverse as Pico Iyer, Sara Wheeler, Tom Bissell, and Robert Macfarlane have quietly stretched the boundaries of the genre. The Long Field , by the American writer Pamela Petro, is a beautiful examination of her love affair with Wales that brilliantly explores the ideas of home, loss, language, sexuality, and of course love.

It’s labeled a memoir, and published in Britain.

Thomas Swick

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The 69 Greatest Fiction Travel Books of All Time

By Boris Kachka

First things first, you may be thinking: What is a fiction travel book, anyway? Well, here's what we think: It's a book in which a place is as important a character as the protagonist; it's a book so informed by the writer's culture that it's impossible to read it without uncovering the life of the author behind it; it's a book that has shaped the way we see a certain place; it's a book whose events and characters could be set nowhere else. So for everyone who, like Michael Ondaatje, got his first glimpse of Japan through Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country; or, like Nathan Englander, found India in Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance; or discovered the world through Homer's Odyssey—this is the list to have. Read on.

Absurdistan

Gary Shteyngart (2006)

"It's probably the best contemporary travel novel," says Darin Strauss. "Certainly the most fun." The Russian immigrant's second book tops his first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, in screwball inventiveness, with a gluttonous character in the slothful tradition of Oblomov who (sometimes literally) flies over the Bronx and hails from an autonomous ex-Soviet republic that could exist only in Shteyngart's mind. "The sweep," Strauss says, "is matched only by the humor and exuberance of the prose" (Random House, $14).

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain (1885)

Huck and Jim's "downstream education," as Jonathan Raban puts it, is important for numerous reasons, but alongside its lessons in the American vernacular and the history of race, there is the canonization of the Mississippi. "The idea of the river as America's first great interstate arterial highway, at once a place of magical solitude in nature and of fraught encounters with society, survives even now," says Raban (Bantam, $6).

The Alexandria Quartet

Lawrence Durrell (1957-1960)

These four novels come as a set, with different perspectives on essentially the same forlorn story. They "play with time and point of view like a Charlie Kaufman script," says Darin Strauss, but "are worth reading not for their gimmickry—supposedly based on the theories of Einstein and Freud—but for their lush descriptions of Egypt. Durell was more famous as a poet than a novelist, and his pointillist evocations of Alexandria are breathtaking" (Penguin; set, $45).

Jim Crace (1992)

Inspired by London, the unnamed city of the master novelist's morality tale about a self-made millionaire and his utopian dreams almost upstages the Dickensian struggles at its heart. "There is so much life and strife and detail," says Amy Bloom. "An entire world has been conjured up, street by street, an imagined city with every cobblestone and desire and character made real" (out-of-print).

The Baron in the Trees

Italo Calvino (1977)

Imagine John Cheever's swimmer traveling via tree instead of suburban pool—for his entire life—and you have Calvino's fairy tale of an eighteenth-century Italian boy who climbs a tree one day and never comes down. Michael Ondaatje calls this world "a thrilling, unforgettable universe, beautifully evoked, completely real and believable—a landscape where there are great adventures and love affairs and politics and wars" (Harvest, $14).

The Big Sleep

Raymond Chandler (1939)

This caper redefined the city that W. H. Auden called "the great wrong place" and which Phillip Lopate dubs "the city that didn't want to be a city." Lopate loves that, contrary to its bright reputation, Chandler's Los Angeles is "portrayed as a very occult, secretive place." "Don't expect sunshine and palm trees," seconds David Ebershoff. "His L.A. is a shadowland—damp with fog, dark with night, and peopled with killers and cons" (Vintage, $14).

Prosper Mérimée (1841)

In the lamentably obscure French writer's most accomplished novel, a jaded colonel and his daughter journey to Corsica in search of untouched paradise, only to become immersed in international intrigue, culture clash, and a still-thriving ancient tradition of the vendetta. Fernanda Eberstadt calls it "a shrewd, dispassionate portrait of nineteenth-century Corsica" (Kessinger, $21).

Come to Africa and Save Your Marriage

Maria Thomas (1987)

This story collection is one of only three books by Thomas, who died in a 1989 plane crash en route to an Ethiopian refugee camp. Thomas wrote, "A language you don't understand reminds you how vulnerable you are," and it's through her writing and our own journeys, says Julia Alvarez, that "we discover that it is precisely this vulnerability which connects us with one another—a good enough reason to travel if nothing else" (Soho, $12).

Cousin Bette

Honoré de Balzac (1846)

Phillip Lopate says that his favorite Balzac novel, and what it has to say about life, are summarized in a single sentence from the book: "In the heart of Paris the close alliance between squalor and splendor…characterizes the queen of capitals." There's also Balzac's use of the courtesan, "the figure who threads her way through Paris and unites wealth and poverty by beauty." For this "cartographer of cities and societies," as Lopate calls him, the geography is just as important as the social intrigue (Oxford, $12).

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866)

This map of the soul of modern man is also not too shabby at nailing St. Petersburg's crooked canals and alleyways. It inspires daily tours in the city, which has changed tremendously since the fall of communism—though not as much as you'd think. Francine Prose says that, beyond Nevsky Prospect and its Versace stores, "it's still the same. You feel Crime and Punishment all over the place" (Vintage, $16).

Rachel Chang

Kristi Kellogg

Caitlin Morton

Claire Boobbyer

The Day of Judgment

Salvatorre Satta (1979)

Satta's posthumously published novel gets deep inside Sardinia at a time (a century ago) when it was a backwater, and his depiction of its "demoniacal sadness" is hardly the stuff of tourist brochures. Such inertia means a listless plot, but for Colin Thubron, the author's observations of "timeless, eccentric lives" make it worthy on its own terms (FSG, $14).

The Day of the Locust

Nathanael West (1939)

Drawing on West's stint as a screenwriter in Depression-era Hollywood, this iconic farce was fated to be repeated as noir in the Chandler era. "His L.A. is a hysteric pleasure dome that teems with grotesqueries and perversity," says Nathaniel Rich. "Ever since I read it, I can't go to L.A. without thinking of cockfighting" (Signet, $7).

Dead Lagoon

Michael Dibdin (1995)

This is the fifth in Dibdin's Aurelio Zen mystery series but the first in which the investigator from Rome revisits his native town. "Venice is a marvel," says Jonathan Raban. "A familiar place rendered strange and foreboding by the author's intimate familiarity with its streets—no gondolas for the pedestrian Zen. I greatly admire Thomas Mann, but it's the Venice of Dead Lagoon that I walk in my Italian dreams" (Vintage, $14).

Death in Venice

Thomas Mann (1912)

Tied for second place on our list of most-nominated books, this dark classic of pederast obsession resonates brilliantly with its setting. "Gray Venice in the high season, with its humid air and empty corridors, amplifies the story's meaning by a thousand," says David Ebershoff. "This small book is both a warning and a love letter to Venice and all who long to travel there. Heartbreak, decay, lethal regret? Sign me up." Also nominated by: Francine Prose, Jennifer Belle (HarperPerennial, $13).

Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes (1605)

How many travelers, seduced by fictional narratives, have flown to exotic destinations only to discover how comically pedestrian and daunting life can be no matter where they go? Quixote, besotted as he was with tales of chivalry, was the first to do that—even if it took a bit longer, in his case, for disillusion to set in. Nominated by: Matthew Sharpe (Penguin, $12).

The Epic of Gilgamesh

(circa 2500 B.C.)

There are many translations of the world's oldest epic poem (sorry, Homer), but Julia Alvarez recommends Herbert Mason's version of the story, in which the titular great king, inconsolable over a friend's death, goes off in search of "immortality and a way to keep loss at bay." Alvarez likes the tip he gets from a barmaid, "good advice for any traveler: 'Fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice' " (Mariner, $9).

Far Tortuga

Peter Matthiessen (1975)

Perhaps better known as a phenomenal travel memoirist, Matthiessen also wrote fiction as adventurous as its hardscrabble characters. In this elegy for a dying ecology and a dying livelihood, a boatful of turtle fishermen roam across the overfished Bahamas, riffing one another in pidgin dialects between encounters with near disaster and modern pirates. Nominated by: Michael Ondaatje (Vintage, $17).

A Fine Balance

Rohinton Mistry (1995)

Mistry manages his own fine balance between detail and scope in this Mumbai-set novel. "Few have taken us beneath India's intense surfaces and into its forgotten streets with the quiet, patient care of its native son," says Pico Iyer. "Going on a train ride with Mistry is amazing," adds Nathan Englander. "You can feel the people packed in and the lunch tins and the swarming city. It could be among my top five books of the last 25 years" (Vintage, $16).

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway (1940)

This taciturn tale of stoic warriors ground down by the Spanish Civil War reminds us, says Peter Hessler, that "Hemingway was a remarkable landscape writer. Sometimes this can be forgotten because we tend to focus on other—and more easily parodied—subjects and interests" (Scribner, $15).

Good Morning, Midnight

Jean Rhys (1939)

Decades before the Caribbean-born British writer became acclaimed for Wide Sargasso Sea, she evoked Paris through a glass very darkly in this first-person tale of a woman's melancholy return to the city. "This book transports me to Paris like no other book can," says Jennifer Belle. "In fact, I feel more like I'm in Paris when reading this book than when I'm actually in Paris" (Norton, $14).

A Hazard of New Fortunes

William Dean Howells (1890)

The critic Alfred Kazin credited Howells, onetime editor of Boston's Atlantic Monthly, with tilting the axis of literature south, to New York, when he moved there in the 1880s. His fictionalized account of the move was "about a city at a moment when it's bursting with promise," says Phillip Lopate, who wrote the introduction to this edition. Protagonist Basil March's encounters with teeming immigrant New York shift his politics, just as it turned Howells into a champion of the masses (Modern Library, $15).

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad (1902)

Not enough can be said of the influence of this imagined trip to the Congo. "Conrad established a genre in this novel," says Alexander McCall Smith, "and since then many writers have contributed to the canon of spiritually bleak, uncomfortable journeys into dark places. Unfortunately, it has established a mold for many a subsequent despairing literary vision of Africa" (Norton, $12).

A High Wind in Jamaica

Richard Hughes (1929)

Hughes's tale of warped children set upon by pirates reads like Lord of the Flies, but with irony. Nathaniel Rich relishes its depictions of Jamaica as "a country in the last throes of a losing battle with nature," while Jesse Ball loves what happens after the kids leave the island and hit the waters: "This book of books invests everything it touches with an indefinite but shimmering brilliance. Do you want to be hauled off by force along with your brothers and sisters? I do!" (NYRB, $14).

Julio Cortázar (1963)

The Argentine-Parisian novelist's very strangely structured novel—complete with contradictory instructions on how to read it—boils down to an evocative story of a man's obsession with a disappeared lover. Horacio Castellanos Moya reports that several generations of Latin American readers have gone to Paris primarily "to repeat the enchanting journey of Cortázar's fictional characters through the city. Warning: That journey ends in the cemetery of Montparnasse, where the author is buried" (Pantheon, $17).

A House for Mr. Biswas

V. S. Naipaul (1961)

Naipaul's breakthrough book, and arguably his best, is a travel novel writ large in that it tracks a whole culture in diaspora. Naipaul's Trinidad "kept reminding me of the India I grew up in," says Manil Suri. "And yet, it was different in so many ways—a tantalizing new universe waiting to be explored, to see how Indian culture had taken root and evolved on this faraway shore" (Vintage, $16).

The Inheritance of Loss

Kiran Desai (2006)

Desai's Booker Prize-winning novel of two generations straddling continents struck Phillip Lopate for its scenes of New York kitchens, "the new melting pot" of the city where struggling immigrants rub soiled shoulders. "It's really about two places," he says—New York City and an Indian backwater. "And so she keeps going back and forth between these two, and she's really writing about globalization" (Grove, $14).

Journey to the End of the Night

Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1934)

Wherever anti-hero Ferdinand Bardamu goes—World War I battlefields, French West Africa, the United States—Céline's unforgettably dark, caustic voice is there. Matthew Sharpe prefers the novel's less realistic moments: "There is, in Manhattan, a subterranean club where people go to defecate out in the open while conversing, smoking cigars, etc. Were some generous soul in real life to make the initial capital outlay for such a club, I would gladly be a founding member" (New Directions, $16).

D. H. Lawrence (1923)

Lawrence wrote this novel about a British émigré's encounter Down Under with a secret Fascist army after visiting for only a few weeks. "Lawrence is famously, furiously unfair at every turn—impatient, subjective, all over the place," says Pico Iyer. "Yet no writer had a keener nose or feel for place. Even now, when I return to Australia, the best guidebook I can find is this excessive and inflamed novel" (Cambridge, $60).

Banana Yoshimoto (1988)

Yoshimoto's interwoven family narratives make a new generation of Japanese life accessible to the rest of us. "If someone asks me if I've ever been to Japan, I have to think for a moment," says Jennifer Belle. "Thanks to Yoshimoto, I could swear I've been there. I could almost feel the tonkatsu between my chopsticks, see it sloshing into the dark brown sauce, taste it between my lips" (Black Cat, $13).

Lady Chatterley's Lover

D. H. Lawrence (1929)

Fernanda Eberstadt couldn't resist including Lawrence's novel, which, you must admit, goes places few others dare. She calls the author "the Van Gogh of travel writers, virulently moralistic, every nerve ending hallucinogenically receptive to light, landscape, vegetation, and the human characteristics forged by climate. It's not just a novel about anal sex: It's a great love poem to that most unloved of regions, the British Midlands" (Penguin, $14).

Life and Fate

Vasily Grossman (1959)

The dissident Soviet novelist's take on the Battle of Stalingrad—a book considered so dangerous that authorities destroyed the typewriter ribbons along with the manuscript—is "a very complex and ambitious novel," says Horacio Castellanos Moya, "but I think that the Volga River region itself is the main character." Reading it inspired him to find the Volga on Google Earth, "the first time I did that because of a novel" (NYRB, $23).

Little Infamies

Panos Karnezis (2002)

Karnezis, who moved from Greece to England 16 years ago, manages in these stories to skewer his homeland's inhabitants with a light touch. "He depicts the intricately and hilariously knitted world of a small Greek village so well," says Marisa Silver, "that it makes me want to find such a village and spend time there, meeting the priest and the doctor, the town whore and the barber" (Picador, $14).

The Little Sister

Raymond Chandler (1949)

California was an endless fount of "metaphors and parables" for Chandler, says Pico Iyer, but he likes this underrated caper because it's here that "his chivalric impulse leads him to Hollywood, and the ultimate palace of illusions and similes, which was for him an emblem of a grasping and seductive new world" (Vintage, $13).

Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

Once you get over the shock and the word games and the descriptive genius of this masterwork, you're ready for its cross-country trip into a land as dazzlingly innocent to Humbert as his young charge. "We often forget that the second half of this book is a road-trip novel," says Darin Strauss, "with the old foreign perv and the young nymphet discovering America" (Vintage, $14).

Marguerite Duras (1984)

What is it with travel and age-inappropriate relationships? Duras's novel about a French girl's seduction of a gentleman in '30s Saigon was Marisa Silver's ultimate travel fantasy: "The sensual, palpable languor of a city filled with secrets makes me want to hunt for modern Vietnam's hidden seductions" (Pantheon, $10).

Jamaica Kincaid (1990)

This spare novel about an au pair from the West Indies in an unnamed city that's unmistakably New York made Jennifer Belle see her town "as if for the first time. Through fresh eyes we see an elevator, a bridge, the winter sun." And in Lucy's memories, Barbados shimmers too. "By showing us the artificial smell of lemon-scented shampoo in America, we experience the freshness of a real lemon in her native land" (FSG, $13).

The Makioka Sisters

Junichiro Tanizaki (1948)

"It has a last line so bad that it's amazing," Nathan Englander warns about Tanizaki's chronicle of a declining noble Osaka family on the brink of both personal and national disaster. "But in terms of Osaka, it's just gorgeous. A beautiful wooden city that you know is going to be bombed [during World War II]. . . . It's this idea of reading a book set right before the end of the world" (Vintage, $16).

The Man Without Qualities

Robert Musil (1930-1942)

Some trips are longer than others, but Musil's never-finished 1,700-plus-page masterwork is worth the slog for its deep (yet funny) study of a shallow world. "To Musil, nothing was as absurd as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Vienna was the whipped cream heart of its absurdity," says Fernanda Eberstadt. "A zany tour of turn-of-the-century Vienna's bluestocking suburbs, its imperial hunting lodges, its working-class beer halls" (Vintage, Vol. 1: $22; Vol. 2: $26).

James Galvin (1992)

Heavily based in fact, Galvin's description of what four men did to tame an inaccessible piece of wilderness on the Wyoming-Colorado border is "an extended ode to an American West that is by now largely gone," says Jonathan Burnham Schwartz. The land is the main subject, and "Galvin knows it with an intimacy so deep it can only be imagined; he knows it like family, all its buried pains and stories" (Owl, $14).

Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie (1980)

So many things are extraordinary about Rushdie's masterpiece of magical realism, in which fantasy and metaphor speak for a giant nation's post-colonial history, but Junot Díaz takes from it the lesson that the highest flights of imagination start with making places real. "Who can match Rushdie's fictional evocation of Bombay?" he asks. "In his lying is found much truth" (Random House, $15).

Martin Amis (1985)

Of all the writers to capture what was so very fast, exciting, and wrong about the eighties, Londoner Amis had one odd advantage: He was a self-styled outsider, like his ad-man narrator, John Self. Darin Strauss believes Self "understands New York in the eighties—and gets even those timeless qualities about the city's energy and indifference—in a way that only someone who's looking at it with a foreigner's peeled-eyeball curiosity could" (Penguin, $15).

André Breton (1928)

Breton's work of high surrealism, about a Parisian psychiatric patient with a serious identity crisis, has inspired many writers, including Jesse Ball. "Of books that circle Paris, that define it, that lay it on a thin spoon beside a dram of poison, there are a few," he says. "This book invests it with a great feeling of life, of chance—the whispering of curtains, footsteps, lights in the street, the calling out of voices in the night—in reply to what?" (Grove, $13).

Don DeLillo (1982)

DeLillo's first truly paranoid novel is also his first serious venture abroad—to Greece and the Middle East, where "businesspeople in transit" collude with intelligence services to make sure things go their way. Geoff Dyer calls it "a great and prophetic novel" but also "a fantastic travel essay, dense with amazed delight at the incidents and textures of this ancient and rapidly modernizing world" (Vintage, $15).

Joseph Conrad (1904)

Peter Hessler praises this book for giving "a remarkable sense of the Sulaco landscape"—its rocky peninsula and silent gulf ringed by mountains. It's an entirely made-up place, in a fictional South American country on the verge of revolution. But Hessler considers it "probably the most famous instance of how travel can inspire the creation of a place that feels more authentic than anything we see as tourists" (Penguin, $14).

The Odessa Tales

Isaac Babel (1920s)

The great Russian Jewish writer wrote fantastic war stories before he was killed by Stalin, but these tales of Jewish gangsters in Babel's birthplace make Nathan Englander feel almost certain he's been there. "I can see the overturned market or the guy in his wheelchair," he says. "The highest compliment a writer can get is when you recognize something in your memory but don't remember whether you've ever been to that place" (in Collected Stories; Penguin, $17).

The Odyssey

Homer (circa 750 B.C.)

Unsurprisingly, the book that made travel synonymous with literature when both were in their prehistory earns the most nominations from our writers. For Matthew Sharpe, it brings to mind a cascade of cultural successors: "Hansel and Gretel," E.T., and his favorite number by Steely Dan, which he quotes ("Still I remain tied to the mast . . ."). David Ebershoff simply calls it "the greatest work of travel literature. Period. Without this book, would we have any of the books on this list?" Also nominated by: Jonathan Raban, Marisa Silver (Penguin, $15).

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel García Márquez (1967)

Macondo, the fictional setting of García Márquez's magical-realist magnum opus spanning Colombian history, has become such a vivid location in the minds of millions of readers—"everybody's fictional place," as Francine Prose puts it—that García Márquez's hometown actually tried to add Macondo to its name two years ago. Colum McCann says, "The imagination feels awakened with every word" (Harper Perennial, $15).

On the Road

Jack Kerouac (1957)

Alexander McCall Smith calls Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness road novel "a book to read when one is about eighteen," but here's a good reason for another look: last year's release of the even more unbridled "scroll" version, drawn from the 120-foot roll of paper on which Kerouac originally wrote it out. "The physical manuscript came to stand for the journey itself—long and rolling," says Smith. "This novel goes to the very heart of American restlessness" (Penguin, $15).

The Passion

Jeanette Winterson (1987)

Napoleon's cook, not at all thrilled with his posting in bleak wintertime Russia, falls in love with a mysterious Venetian web-footed female gondolier in the British writer's surreal and dazzling second novel. Myla Goldberg says it "made me want to go to Venice more than anything, and once I got there, Winterson's fantastical version added invaluable, invisible dimensions to the experience" (Grove, $13).

John Steinbeck (1947)

Steinbeck's otherwise timeless and placeless fable, in which an impoverished Mexican pearl diver unwittingly brings ruin on his family after pulling up the largest pearl known to man, is grounded in its beautiful landscape. "Yellow, brown, orange, white—these are the colors of Baja California," says David Ebershoff. "Their purity, their earthiness, are reflected in Steinbeck's simple prose and simple, devastating tale" (Penguin, $14).

Albert Camus (1947)

The Oran of Camus's novel, whose inhabitants are tested in the worst ways by a gruesome epidemic, is an actual Algerian city but feels so archetypal that Nathan Englander originally thought it was fictional. "It's a holy place to me, it's in my pantheon," says Englander, despite the horrors Camus depicts. "To literally lock the gates of the city—that's wonderful to me as a reader, and an excellent education as a novelist" (Vintage, $13).

The Professor's House

Willa Cather (1925)

Jane Hamilton treasures Cather because she "doesn't know another writer who has that power to transport us to the natural world," in this case America's great prairies. But it's the setting of Colorado's Mesa Verde in her melancholy seventh novel, "before it was discovered, before it was a destination," that appeals most. "She makes plain the grace of solitude in a place that is at once the loneliest spot and yet so strangely peopled" (Vintage, $13).

The Quiet American

Graham Greene (1955)

Greene's prescient Vietnam novel "captures the beauty, loneliness, and moral complexity of the expat experience," says Myla Goldberg, "and presents pre-war Vietnam as a fascinating and terrifying triangle of geography, politics, and history." Pico Iyer believes the place "brought out the heartbroken poet" in Greene, who "caught much in the country that might move a traveler today. Saigon, for all its new-generation motorbikes and frenzy, in its shadows and corners remains part of the Greene zone" (Penguin, $14).

The Raj Quartet

Paul Scott (1966-1974)

One way to understand India would be to look back at how it was constructed—and deconstructed—on the eve of independence, and Paul Scott's four epic novels fix and dramatize the lost world of British India like no others. "They provoke interest in a culture that no longer exists but in a place that does," says Ann Packer (Everyman's; each two-volume set, $33).

Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick

Herman Melville (1849-1851)

In three years, Melville produced possibly the world's three greatest seagoing novels. But aside from Bartleby, his work isn't generally associated with his home port of New York. Phillip Lopate finds astonishing detail in the Manhattan-based openings of both Moby-Dick and his lesser-known novel, Redburn, which has the added bonus of "great scenes in Liverpool" (Library of America, $40).

The Savage Detectives

Roberto Bolaño (1998)

Like W. G. Sebald, Bolaño died in middle age on the verge of enormous international acclaim. But his equally mind-bending fictional journeys are shaggier and more exuberant. Here, a radical group of Mexico City literati calling themselves Visceral Realists threaten the social order before scattering across the world—to Barcelona, Perpignan, Nicaragua—and later returning to their native country. Francine Prose says that she can no longer visit Mexico City without seeing writer-revolutionaries everywhere (Picador, $15).

The Sheltering Sky

Paul Bowles (1949)

One of the three books our authors cited most, Bowles's hallucinatory novel is "a journey into the primeval heart of Morocco, but really into the furthest reaches of the Other, the Unknown," says Manil Suri. Despite the book's being "not exactly a call to tourism," Suri was moved to travel there six months after reading it. Anthony Doerr believes that "Bowles explores, perhaps as well as Conrad or Camus, what it means to be a stranger," while Pico Iyer calls him "the greatest poet laureate of a traveler's dissolution" (HarperPerennial, $15).

The Shipping News

Annie Proulx (1993)

The writer of hard, spare modern-day Westerns (e.g., "Brokeback Mountain") may be at her best on entirely different terrain. Lara Vapnyar always marvels at "her ability to endow a place with the most complex personality," but slightly prefers her Newfoundland: "cold and gloomy, where the weather is dangerous and the best delicacy is the seal-flipper pie" (Scribner, $15).

Snow Country

Yasunari Kawabata (1948)

The northern reaches of Japan sometimes get as much wintertime snow as Buffalo, but there the comparisons end. In Kawabata's classic, the region's lonely beauty is the third party in a doomed love affair between a sophisticated Tokyo dilettante and a lowly backwater geisha, who stands in for Japan's neglected but enduring native culture. Nominated by: Michael Ondaatje (Vintage, $13).

A Sport and a Pastime

James Salter (1967)

Shades of Lolita (the erotic road-trip part) pass over what Salter has said is his best novel, the charged chronicle of an affair between a privileged Yale dropout and a French shopgirl, consummated in motels dotting the French countryside and observed by an admittedly unreliable voyeur. Nominated by: Michael Ondaatje (FSG, $13).

Cormac McCarthy (1979)

McCarthy's fourth novel is inextricably rooted in its place, namely the roughest parts of fifties Knoxville, seen by an ex-con drinking his life away. Anthony Doerr finds it "a funny, tragic, shocking, beautiful, and dirty portrait," one that "traces the collisions of industry and countryside, privilege and poverty, goatmen and policemen, humidity and snow, drinking and witchcraft—and the Tennessee River twists through all of it" (Vintage, $15).

Patrick Chamoiseau (1992)

Junot Díaz praises this "brilliant blaze of a novel" for encompassing the tangled history of Martinique (as Díaz did for the Dominican Republic in his recent Pulitzer Prize-winning novel). "In these pages and through these words," he says, "you can taste the shark, smell the burning fields of cane, wince under the sun, and feel the black riptide of Caribbean history, pulling, pulling. All that plus the finest evocation of Caribbean shantytown life ever put to paper" (Vintage, $16).

To the Slaughterhouse

Jean Giono (1931)

Better known for his best seller The Man Who Planted Trees, the French writer created some of the most horrific scenes of World War I ever seen in print and contrasted them with evidence of a subtler deterioration back in arid Haute Provence. Fernanda Eberstadt says, "This wildly poetic evocation of a pastoral people about to get decimated makes you love every rocky field and antiquated ram of his chosen homeland" (Peter Owen, $24).

The Tree of Man

Patrick White (1955)

A pioneer of literature from his pioneer country—and a winner of the Nobel Prize—White set the tenor of Australian literature as a constant clash between Western culture and the barren landscape beyond its shores. His saga of one family's attempt to domesticate the bush (only to later see it become suburbs) is "surely Australia's Book of Genesis," says Colin Thubron, and "has the rich sweep of a nineteenth-century Russian novel" (out-of-print).

James Joyce (1922)

How did a chaotically layered, almost impenetrable modernist masterpiece become the book that launched a thousand pub crawls? " Ulysses is an encyclopedic map of human nature, but it also maps Dublin in a perfect way," says Dubliner Colum McCann. Thus, McCann's ambivalence toward the "James Joyce tours and pubs and towels and snow globes": They're hokey but "better than the alternative of silence" (Vintage, $17).

Tony D'Souza (2006)

The most recent novelist to approach the well-trod terrain of Western aid work, D'Souza complicates his narrative by having do-gooder Jack Diaz, marooned on the Ivory Coast, sleep with a succession of natives. Peter Hessler praises D'Souza's handling of "the long-familiar relationships that shape a village, the way an outsider feels when he tries to penetrate this world, and the interplay between traditional folk beliefs and elements of modern city life" (Harcourt, $13).

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Haruki Murakami (1995)

Murakami's vacillations between realism and fable are generally aimed at making sense of contemporary Japan, but this essential novel also encompasses the atrocities of a previous generation. Those are the parts Peter Hessler likes best—"beautifully written set pieces of the Japanese occupation of China and northern Asia. They are really the most haunting chapters of the book" (Vintage, $16).

A Woman in Jerusalem

A. B. Yehoshua (2006)

Yulia, the woman in question, has died in a terrorist bombing, and the quest to clear her name and bury her properly sends characters through traumatized Jerusalem streets and later to the forlorn former Soviet republic where she was born. "I love people who can draw Israel for me," says Nathan Englander, who lived in the same Jerusalem neighborhood during that troubled period. "This book captured a very hard time really well" (Harvest, $14).

Zeno's Conscience

Italo Svevo (1923)

Svevo's comic study of a morally compromised man's Freudian rationalizations—and urban discoveries—was rescued from obscurity by James Joyce. So, thanks to this novel, was decrepit Austro-Hungarian Trieste, which Nathaniel Rich says "feels like a living organism" in this novel: "neurotic, conniving, sophisticated, and deranged—a mirror image of Zeno himself" (Vintage, $15).

Would the Pandemic Stop Paul Theroux From Traveling?

No. Of course not.

Paul Theroux in Hawaii with the chicken and geese he keeps on his property. “If you have geese, you’ll never need a lawnmower,” he said. Credit... Michelle Mishina Kunz for The New York Times

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By Gal Beckerman

• Published March 28, 2021 Updated April 14, 2021

For six days, Paul Theroux, the famous American travel writer, dined on hard-boiled eggs, microwaved dal and wine.

He had set out cross-country in a rented Jeep Compass on the day before Thanksgiving, driving from Cape Cod, where he has a house, to Los Angeles, where he delivered boxes of his papers to his archives at Huntington Library, and then flying on to Hawaii, his other home.

Theroux said he observed a landscape largely emptied out by the coronavirus pandemic, from deserted motels in Sallisaw, Okla., and Tucumcari, N.M., where he stopped to sleep, to a rest area in Tennessee where he had his solitary Thanksgiving meal, and the In-N-Out Burger in Kingman, Ariz., on his last day on the road. Every night, as is his habit, he wrote out in longhand all he had seen.

“It was like a panning shot of America,” he said in a video interview from the North Shore of Oahu, where he has lived off and on for over 30 years.

Theroux turns 80 in April. For a generation of backpackers now gone gray, the tattered paperback accounts of his treks through China, Africa and South America were a prod to adventure, bibles of inspiration under many a mosquito net. He has a new novel out from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in April, “ Under the Wave at Waimea ,” and his best-known book (and his own favorite among them), “ The Mosquito Coast ,” has been adapted into a television series starring his nephew, Justin Theroux, also set to premiere next month.

If this seems like a moment to take stock of an intrepid life and an almost extreme output of writing, Theroux does not see himself as anywhere near done. Before Covid-19 struck, he had plans to go to central Africa. He is deep into another novel and finishing up a new story collection. He himself can’t seem to keep track of the number of books he has written: “Fifty-something maybe?” (It’s actually 56.)

Travel narratives are his signature, a genre he grabbed onto in the early 1970s out of desperation when, as a young novelist with a few books under his belt, he found himself out of ideas. He decided to traverse part of the world by rail, starting from London, where he was living, through the Middle East and as far as Southeast Asia, returning on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The account that emerged from this tiring journey, “ The Great Railway Bazaar ,” has sold over 1.5 million copies and inspired shelves upon shelves of books built on similar conceits.

In just the past decade, Theroux has written about driving solo through Mexico (he always travels alone) in “On the Plain of Snakes” (2019); an exploration of some of the poorest regions of his own country in “ Deep South ” (2015); and a trip to Africa, “ The Last Train to Zona Verde ” (2013), in which he returned to regions he got to know as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s.

This genre — the outsider arrives and offers an assessment of the foreign — has lost ground over the years to travel memoirs like Elizabeth Gilbert’s “ Eat, Pray, Love ” that describe journeys of the internal terrain as much as the people encountered and places seen. Theroux, sitting at his desk scattered with artifacts of those trips — tiny Buddhas, the skull of a scrimshawed monkey he was given in Bali, wooden Polynesian weapons — defended his approach.

“It’s more necessary than ever to find the empathetic experience of meeting another person, being in another culture, to smell it, to suffer it, to put up with the hardship and the nuisances of travel, all of that matters,” Theroux said. He quoted the Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul, who at various moments in Theroux’s writing career was a mentor and a nemesis : “I believe that the present, accurately seized, foretells the future.”

And Theroux agrees. “You don’t have to make forecasts,” he said. “You just write about the things that you see, the things that you hear, the things that you sense, and when you write that, you’re a prophet.”

But there is no great thirst for prophets these days, particularly of the sort who offer judgments of other cultures. Theroux seems aware of this, or at least of the notion that his way of writing about the world is fading.

His new novel tells the story of Joe Sharkey, an aging North Shore surfer who resembles characters Theroux has gotten to know on the beaches near his home. Sharkey feels acutely that he is being overtaken by younger surfers with big endorsements. For him, surfing was a way of life, an existence centered on catching waves, a commitment to the ocean.

Theroux sees surfing as a metaphor for his own life. All he ever wanted was to be able to write without interruption, without the distraction of car alarms going off outside his window or bills arriving in the mail, without the need to do anything else for money but sit day after day at his desk. In many ways, Theroux has achieved this. But like the surfer past his prime, he is not immune to feeling forgotten, to the sense that the world has become hostile to the pure joy of the waves. There’s a fear of being overlooked, unread.

“I was once a hot shot, I was once the punk,” Theroux said. “And anyone who has once been a punk, eventually you’re older, and you see the turning of the years as it is. We all feel it, every writer. They might deny it. But they do, they all feel it.”

There was no sign of Theroux’s storied grumpiness. Critiques of his books have often touched on their cruelly ironic tone, a sense of condescension toward people he meets and fictional characters he creates. Take Stephen King’s assessment in The Book Review of the lightly autobiographical “ Mother Land ” from 2017, which King found to be an “exercise in self-regarding arrogance and self-pity.”

Theroux gets that readers might perceive him as cranky, but he thinks the problem might be with the readers. “You cannot be a grumpy traveler. You will not get anywhere,” he said. “You’ll be killed, you’ll be insulted, you won’t be able to travel. So you need to get along with people. I think that I’m characterized as cantankerous perhaps because if you see things the way they are, and you just describe things the way they are, you can be accused of being unkind.”

One of his oldest friends, the British travel writer and novelist Jonathan Raban , with whom Theroux has swapped manuscripts over the decades, thinks critics have missed an important shift in Theroux’s writing. “Compared to the tone of the earlier work, its sarcasm, its sharp observation and always being from the point of view of an absolute outsider, Paul has developed a kind of humanity in the recent books that I hadn’t seen before,” Raban said.

He pointed to a 2019 essay about a pet goose named Willy whom Theroux raised from birth and cradled in his arms as he died, the animal’s blue eyes gone gray, in a moment described with aching vulnerability. For Raban, this piece, like Theroux’s past few books, signals a move closer to the reader. “From savage sarcasm to tenderness is a pretty long journey,” Raban said.

Age has also played its role. Theroux sees advantages in it, like the older surfer whose decreased stamina forces him to search for new, smarter ways to ride his board — after all, Theroux points out, it was a man in his late 40s, Garrett McNamara, who surfed the largest recorded wave. Theroux can see how traveling as an octogenarian will have its assets. In some cultures, older people are invisible, a benefit in many situations, he said.

In other places he has visited, the elderly are treated with respect. “They either jump out of their chair and give it to you, or they just ignore you,” Theroux said.

And where might he want to go to next? “There are lots of places I’d like to go,” he said. “And there are lots of places I’ve never been. I’ve never been to Scandinavia, but I don’t have any desire to go there.”

What he most wants to do is return. There is value in making your way back to a country you visited when you were younger. It both marks time in your own life and acts as a sort of gauge for how a society is changing.

“It tells you about the direction of the world,” Theroux said. “What’s going to happen to the world? And you find that you can extrapolate that by revisiting a place that you knew well. Going back to England, going back to Malawi, going back to China, to India. It’s a fascinating thing. So if you ask me what travel I’m most looking forward to: I like going back to places.”

Follow New York Times Books on Facebook , Twitter and Instagram , sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar . And listen to us on the Book Review podcast .

Gal Beckerman is an editor at the Book Review and the author of “When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry.” More about Gal Beckerman

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20 Best American Writers

There is a great and proud tradition of American writers, including some of the world’s most famous authors . Novels, plays, and poems pour out of the United States, with increasing numbers of women, African American, Native American and Hispanic writers making a strong contribution. There have been twelve literature Nobel Prize laureates , beginning with Sinclair Lewis in 1930 to Bob Dylan, in 2016. Other American writers who were laureates include such household names as T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck. American writers’ contribution to English literature is incalculable

The American literary tradition began when some of the early English colonists recounted their adventures in the New World for the benefit of readers in their mother country (see our list of the best English authors ). Some of those early writings were quite accomplished, such as the account of his adventures by Captain John Smith in Virginia and the journalistic histories of John Winthrop and William Bradford in New England.

It was in the Puritan colonies that published American literature was born, with writers like Thomas Hooker and Roger Williams producing works to promote their visions of the religious state. Perhaps the first book to be published by in America was the Bay Psalm Book in 1640, produced by thirty ministers, led by Richard Mather and John Cotton. It was followed by passionate histories like Edward Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence (1654) and Cotton and Mather’s epic Magnalia Christi Americana (1702).

The American Revolution and the subsequent independence of the United States was a time of intellectual activity together with social and economic change. The founding fathers of the new state included the writers, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Philip Freneau, the first American lyric poet of distinction, the pamphleteer Thomas Paine, later an attacker of conventional religion, and the polemicist Francis Hopkinson, who was also the first American composer. The 19th-century saw the spreading and recognition of American writing in Europe with the folk stories of Washington Irving, the frontier adventures of Fenimore Cooper and the moralising verse of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Then came the giants, who took even the old world by storm and are still regarded as being among the greats of Western literature: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and the poet, Walt Whitman.

That romantic trend was interrupted by two of America’s great writers, Henry James, and Mark Twain, who threw the doors open to a new realism and changed American literature, setting it up for the rich literature that followed and which has not diminished. James emigrated to Europe and embraced psychological realism in novels such as Portrait of a Lady (1881), and Twain used national dialects in classics like Huckleberry Finn (1885).

The twentieth century witnessed the flowering of American literature. Confronted by the violence of the 20th century, a sense of despair was reflected in the literature, and the particular conditions of American society with all its diversity found its way into American writing.   In the 1950s, major dramatists, notably Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Sam Shepard,  developed the American theatre. African-American writers, such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, dealt with racial inequality and violence in contemporary US society while Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison focused on the 20th-century history of African-American women. In the 1960s, novelists such as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Joseph Heller examined the Jewish experience in American society.

Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016. It was a controversial decision. However, it points to a new development in the progress of American literature when a songwriter’s work is regarded as literature. There have been several great American songwriters in the past century and one can find many of the concerns of modern America in the national songbook but this is the first time that American songs have been regarded as “literature.” Over seven decades Dylan has addressed the changes that America has experienced, ranging over war, race, climate change, and many other phenomena, producing a comprehensive commentary on the times in which we live. Some of the lyrics of his songs are regarded as being among the finest poetry of the period.

Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804 – 1864

Edgar Allan Poe 1809 –1849

Herman Melville 1819 – 1891

Walt Whitman 1819-1892

Emily Dickinson 1830 – 1886

Mark Twain 1835 – 1910

Henry James 1843 – 1916

T.S. Eliot 1888 – 1965

F. scott fitzgerald 1896 – 1940.

William Faulkner 1897 –1962

Tennessee Williams 1911-1983

Arthur Miller 1915 – 2005

Joseph Heller 1923 – 1999

Ernest Hemingway 1899 – 1961

Raymond Chandler 1888 – 1959

Toni Morrison 1931 – 2019

Vladimir Nabokov 1899 – 1977

Flannery O’Connor 1925 – 1964

John Steinbeck 1902 – 1968

John Updike 1923 – 2009

Kurt Vonnegut 1922 – 2007

Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, Shirley Jackson (underrated as a novelist – she wrote eight that I know of.) Also love the inclusion of Flannery O’Connor.

I have wish to translate USA books into odia language

Sinclair Lewis.

I have wish to read and translate Abraham Lincoln biography into odia language

Good basic list. I’d add Ray Bradbury, Edward Abbey, Sig Olson and Thomas C. Stuhr. All very underrated American authors.

What the heck is wrong with you people? You have this very well written, fact- and concept-filled website, requiring concentration to fully appreciate its richness. Then, you ask us to remove ad blockers and you run these asinine, extremely distracting video ads along the right margin. Stupid multiplied by stupid. Run only static ads.

Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel is underrated as is Richard Wright’s Native son and The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron.

How simply annoying is to always come upon the “the best 20 American authors”… What may be ‘Best’ to you, may not be to other readers. Success of books aren’t always based on talent, quality, etc thus “underrated authors” but on whims and marketing. If you’re going to make a list be fair and square.

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What to read: the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2023 winner and shortlist

​This year’s winner of the annual Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards is Silvia Vasquez-Lavado for her courageous travel memoir In The Shadow of the Mountain, one of many inspirational journeys on the shortlist.

This year’s winner of the annual Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards is Silvia Vasquez-Lavado for her courageous travel memoir In The Shadow of the Mountain . The accolade was revealed on Thursday 16 March, 2023, at Stanfords book store in central London. This year's shortlist included some seriously inspirational journeys taking in such diverse destinations as Iran, the Himalayas, Bolivia and the High Atlas. Undertaken in all manner of ways — on foot, by boat, vintage Land Rover and led by camels —several titles incorporate a personal journey, delving back into complex family histories that prove challenging and life-changing.  

Celebrating the world’s best travel writing, the awards take their name from Edward Stanford, founder of the travel books and map shop established in London in 1853, and they were judged this year by authors Colin Thubron, Sunny Singh, Julia Wheeler, Lois Pryce, Caroline Eden and journalists Ash Bhardwaj and Jeremy Bassetti.  

THE WINNER: In the Shadow of the Mountain Peruvian Silvia Vasquez-Lavado returns home to face her demons, and discovers a passion for climbing that takes her across the Seven Summits. Taking on Everest with a group of troubled young women, this is a travelogue that’s about more than conquering tough terrain. Octopus Publishing Group, £16.99 .

The shortlist

1. Walking with Nomads Adventurer and TV presenter Alice Morrison carries readers on three epic journeys across Morocco, taking in the Sahara and Atlas Mountains accompanied by three Amazigh Muslim men and their camels. Alice’s tale reveals the transformative nature of travel in some of the world’s harshest terrains. Simon & Schuster, £20.00

2. High: A Journey Across the Himalayas through Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal and China This high-altitude odyssey takes in the peaks and people who live and work in the world’s tallest mountain range. Erika Fatland takes a journey that enables the region’s landscapes, histories and hidden communities to step into the spotlight. Quercus, £30 .

3. My Family and Other Enemies: Life and Travels in Croatia’s Hinterland Journalist Mary Novakovich journeys into the hinterland of Croatia to explore both her ongoing relationship with the region of Lika in central Croatia, where her parents were born and she summered as a child, and the complex history and rich culture of this little-explored Balkan region. Bradt, £9.99 .

4. The Po: An Elegy for Italy’s Longest River Italy-based British author and journalist Tobias Jones travels along the 405-mile length of the Po — Virgil’s ‘king of rivers’. Along the waterway, he gathers stories of battles, cuisines, religions and music lost to time and paints a picture of the quirks and oddities of contemporary Italy. Head of Zeus, £25.00 .

5. The Last Overland: Singapore to London: The Return Journey of the Iconic Land Rover Expedition This travelogue is inspired by Tim Slessor’s 1955 expedition from London to Singapore. Alex Bescoby recreated that journey in reverse, travelling some 19,000 miles in the same Oxford Land Rover. Michael O’Mara Books, £20 .

6. Crossed Off the Map: Travels in Bolivia Combining travel writing, history and reportage, Shafik Meghji explores how a country often overlooked by the world has impacted cultures worldwide, noting its unexpected influence, say, on the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the dynastic collapse in China. Latin American Bureau, £14.95 .

7. The Slow Road to Tehran: A Revelatory Bike Ride through Europe and the Middle East A journey of discovery for one woman and her bike took Rebecca Lowe through Iran in 2015 as the Syrian war and refugee crisis raged. The book aims to shift perceptions of an often misunderstood part of the world. September Publishing, £18.99 .

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Here are some of Ohio State's most famous alumni, from authors to athletes to actors

Ohio State University has produced its share of famous graduates in 154 years. Some are famous for their contributions to American history. Others are for their athletic prowess, musical achievement or business acumen.

Before their rise to fame, these people likely walked The Oval and studied in Thompson Library like so many other OSU students before them.

While we understand that readers might find gaps and omissions, we tried to focus our selections on former Buckeyes who transcend celebrity and cemented themselves as notable historical figures. Let us know on social media if you think there's someone we missed.

Jesse Owens

Jesse Owens was a track and field athlete who gained international attention after winning four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. Owens, a Black man, "rebuked Hitler's race theory" when he took home the medals while Nazism was on the rise in Germany, according to Owens' website.

Owens was also responsible for "the greatest 45 minutes in sports" when he set three world records and tied another at the Big Ten Track and Field Championships in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1935. Owens attended OSU from 1933-1936 but never finished his degree.

He was later awarded an honorary doctorate of athletic arts in 1972.

Urban Meyer

Urban Meyer is a college and NFL football coach, most well-known for his six-year stint as Ohio State University's head football coach. During his time there, the Buckeyes went 7-0 against Michigan, won the first NCAA playoff championship, and went 54-4 in Big Ten games. He is currently an on-air analyst at FOX Sports.

He earned a master's degree in sports administration from OSU in 1988.

R.L. Stine is an author best known for his Goosebumps series of horror novels for children. He's also written several other horror series, like Fear Street , and collections of joke books. According to his personal website he's sold over 400 million copies of his books, making him "one of the best-selling authors in history." He graduated from OSU in 1965 with a bachelor's degree in English.

Jack Nicklaus

Jack Nicklaus is a retired professional golfer considered by many to be one of the greatest golfers of all time , if not the greatest. According to his company's website , he has 73 official tour victories and 118 total victories around the world. He is also the founder of Nicklaus Design, a golf course construction and design company. Nicklaus attended OSU for three and a half years without receiving a degree, but he was later awarded an honorary degree in 1972.

Richard Lewis

Richard Lewis was a groundbreaking stand-up comedian, writer and actor known for his neurotic, dark comedy style. He also played a recurring character on Curb Your Enthusiasm , an HBO comedy show run by Lewis's longtime friend, Larry David. He received a bachelor's degree in business administration from OSU in 1969.

An avid Buckeye fan for decades, Lewis died of a heart attack Feb. 27, 2024 .

Alan Freed was a radio disc jockey who helped popularize the term "rock n' roll." He got his start at radio stations in Akron, New Castle and Youngstown before moving to Cleveland radio. While at WJW-AM, he started a nightly radio show called "The Moondog Rock & Roll House Party", which was eventually syndicated around the world.

He attended OSU for two quarters before joining the army in 1941.

Bobby Knight

Bobby Knight was a college basketball coach most known for his 29 years coaching the Indiana University Hoosiers. He also coached the USA men's Olympic basketball in 1984, bringing home a gold medal. When he retired in 2008, he had over 902 wins and three NCAA championships.

He graduated from OSU in 1962.

George Steinbrenner

George Steinbrenner was a Cleveland shipping magnate and owner of the New York Yankees for 37 years. Commonly referred to as " The Boss ," he was known for his hands-on managerial style and frequent firings (and sometimes hirings and re-firings). He was also famously portrayed by Larry David on Seinfeld . Steinbrenner graduated from OSU with a master's degree in physical education in 1955.

Patricia Heaton

Patricia Heaton is an Emmy award-winning actress and comedian most well-known for portraying Debra Barone on Everybody Loves Raymond . She also won awards for her performances in ABC's The Middle and her Food Network Show Patricia Heaton Parties . Heaton graduated from OSU with a bachelor's degree in drama.

Les Wexner is a businessman and philanthropist who founded L Brands, an international company that ran Victoria's Secret, PINK and Bath & Body Works. In 2021, L Brands spun-off its Victoria's Secret brand and became known as Bath & Body Works, Inc.

Wexner served as CEO of L Brands until 2020, when he stepped down over his association with financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein .

He graduated from OSU in 1959 with a bachelor's degree in business administration.

Gary LeVox is a founding member and the lead singer of country band Rascal Flatts . Since forming the band in 1999, they've had 17 number-one singles and sold over 23 million albums, according to LeVox's website. He is an OSU alum.

Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein was an artist and a key figure in the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. Alongside other contemporaries like Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein helped usher in a new age of art in the 1960s with his comic book-style paintings. Lichtenstein spent his undergraduate and graduate years at OSU in the 1940s before going on to teach at the school from 1949-1951.

Curtis LeMay

Curtis LeMay was an Air Force general who commanded the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and led a firebombing campaign against Japanese cities during World War II. After the war, he commanded the Berlin Airlift. He graduated from OSU with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering.

John Kasich

John Kasich is a politician and author known for his time as the 69th governor of Ohio from 2011-2019. Kasich also ran for president in 2000 and 2016. Before he was governor, he represented Ohio's 12th congressional district in Congress for 18 years.

He earned a bachelor's degree in political science from OSU in 1974.

J.D. Vance is an author, businessman, Silicon Valley entreprenur and current U.S. senator for Ohio. Before being elected in 2022, he was most well-known for his book Hillbilly Elegy , which outlined his experience growing up in Middletown, Ohio.

He graduated from OSU in 2009 with a bachelor's degree in political science and philosophy.

Sherrod Brown

Sherrod Brown is a politician, author and current U.S. senator for Ohio. He got his start in politics as a state representative before being elected as Ohio's secretary of state in 1982. He went on to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives before taking on his current role in the Senate in 2007. He received a master's degree in education from OSU in 1979 and a master's degree in public administration in 1981.

Larry Sanger

Larry Sanger is a software developer and philosopher who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001. Before co-founding the site, he served as editor-in-chief of Nupedia, Wikipedia's predecessor. He received a master's of art from OSU in 1995 and a doctorate in philosophy in 2000.

Honorable mentions

These celebrities didn't receive a degree from OSU, but they are associated with the college in some way.

Dwight Yoakam

Dwight Yoakam is a Grammy award-winning country musician and actor. His first album, Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. went double-platinum. Since then, he has released 16 additional albums.

He attended OSU from 1975-1976 before dropping out to pursue his musical career.

J.K. Simmons

J.K. Simmons is an award-winning actor known for his portrayal of J. Jonah Jameson in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films and for his supporting role in Whiplash which garnered him an Oscar for best supporting actor. He has also leant his voice to a number of video games and animated shows like Portal 2 and Invincible .

Simmons didn't receive a degree from OSU, but he is a vocal and prominent Ohio State Buckeyes fan.

Dishonorable mention: Jeffrey Dahmer

Jeffrey Dahmer was a serial killer and sex offender who killed 17 men and boys between the years of 1978 and 1991. He attended OSU for a quarter in 1978 before dropping out.

McDonald's All-American Games: Houston's Carlton, O'Neal show out; East takes boys game

For the second consecutive year, Toyota Center hosted the McDonald's All-American high school basketball games on Tuesday night.

Before they were famous, some of basketball's greats have dressed in the red and yellow jerseys and competed in this exhibition over the years. Tonight will be a big national spotlight for some of the college basketball and, possibly, the NBA's future stars.

In the 47th edition of the boys game, Boogie Fland's putback with 45 seconds left stood as the game-winner as the East won 88-86 after trailing all of the first half. Each team awarded an MVP. Derik Queen (Maryland) for the East and Dylan Harper (Rutgers) for the West. Queen had a game-high 23 points. Harper had 22.

In the 22nd edition of the girls game, Me'Arah O'Neal (Episcopal) totaled 12 points and five rebounds while Justice Carlton (Seven Lakes) had eight points as West fell 98-74 in the girls championship.

Boys final: East 88, West 86

Boogie Fland had a huge night and he capped it with 45 seconds left in the game to lift East to the win. West missed a buzzer-beater at the end.

Action Jackson

For East, Ian Jackson has been very clutch from beyond-the-arc this half.

The No. 16-rated (ESPN 100) small forward is heading to North Carolina. He has 19 points.

East leads 80-78 with less than 5 minutes left.

Queen is royally good

Derik Queen started strong with the game's first two field goals. He continues to contribute majorly for East as he has 21 points and eight rebounds with less than 7 to play in the game.

Maryland is getting a good one.

End 3Q: West 66, East 62

Syracuse signee Donavan Freeman just nailed a 3-pointer at the buzzer for West. He's No. 19 on ESPN 100.

This has been a really fun game. 

Carrying Duke's Flagg

The No. 1 recruit in the nation is helping the East get back in this. 

Cooper Flagg, a Duke signee, just slammed home a dunk here in the third quarter and he may or may not have finished off an ally-op earlier in the quarter (haven't seen a replay if he touched it).

East is down 56-55 with under 4 left in the quarter.

Related: Did Bronny James just tweet a picture of himself in a Duke jersey?

Harper leads the way for West

East was down big in the first and climbed to within a point early in the third quarter.

Dylan Harper knocks down a big 3 for West. He has 16 points and a timeout is called.

West leads 52-45 and on a 6-0 run. Under 7 minutes left in the quarter.

Halftime: West 44, East 37

Dylan Harper leads the West with 14 points. Tre Johnson has nine.

Boogie Fland and Derik Queen each has 10 points for the East.

Halftime performers: Bia, Lil Yachty

Boogie fever

Boogie Fland. Don't forget that name.

The Kentucky signee has knocked down a couple 3s late here in the first half. He is the No. 15-rated recruit on ESPN 100.

His legal name is Johnuel. But we'll stick with Boogie. 

Tre Johnson, a Dallas native who played at Link Academy in Missouri, is having himself a night already.

The 6-foot-6 guard is a perfect 3-for-3 from 3-point land as the West continues to pour it on.

Johnson is the No. 5-rated recruit on ESPN 100 and is signed with the Texas Longhorns. Rodney Terry is going to love this guy.

West leads 42-25 past the midway point of the second quarter.

Dylan Harper impresses

Dylan Harper, son of former NBA standout Ron Harper, will give you a reason to tune into Rutgers basketball next fall.

Harper has shown a knack for scoring so far this evening and just put a perfect pass on the run to V.J. Edgecombe, who threw down an ally-op.

Harper, the No. 3 recruit on ESPN 100 as well as No. 2 Ace Bailey are both heading to Rutgers this season. The Scarlet Knights will need their talent to compete in a Big Ten Conference that's adding four programs from the west coast.

West leads after 1Q

The West leads the East 21-16 after the first quarter.

Fun game. Lot of dunks. Everyone getting an opportunity to shine in the national spotlight.

An early look at Bidunga

Flory Bidunga, a 6-foot-9 forward from Kokomo (Ind.) isn't playing in Houston for the last time (look out, Cougars).

The future Kansas Jayhawk looks like he could contribute now in the Big 12. 

Bidunga, the No. 9-ranked player on ESPN 100, has slammed home two dunks to ignite West. 

ESPN just showed some of his high school soccer highlights from the fall. The big(!) man had 11 goals and says the soccer has helped with his basketball footwork.

Queen the king to start

It's been a hot start for Maryland commit Derik Queen, who scored the first two buckets for the East. Queen is the No. 10-ranked player on ESPN 100.

Can you believe it's been 10 years?

In the 2014 McDonald's All-American Game, Tomball native Justin Jackson (who played for HCYA) was the MVP.

Since then, Jackson won an NCAA National Championship with North Carolina in 2017.

Jackson has since bounced around professionally. He's played for six NBA franchises, most recently Minnesota last month. He's currently in the G League playing for the Texas Legends.

Ready for the boys game

Time to get the boys McDonald's All-American Game rolling at Toyota Center.

Who of these 24 top seniors of 2024 will we be talking about a year from now in the Final Four?

Girls Final: East 98, West 74

Me'Arah O'Neal did Episcopal proud with 12 points and five rebounds. Justice Carlton showed out for Seven Lakes with eight points as West fell from the beginning and never really was in it.

East had co-MVPs and they are the top two recruits in the country.

Joyce Edwards, the South Carolina commit on the East, finished with 19 points and three rebounds. She's the No. 2 recruit on ESPN 100.

ESPN 100 No. 1 Sarah Strong (uncommitted) had a double-double of 11 points and 10 rebounds.

O'Neal taking it to the hoop

Me'Arah O'Neal has a bucket in the fourth quarter and just drove to the hoop again for a foul. She's running out of time on making that 3-pointer, but she has a quality 10 points and five boards for the West with 5:16 left.

Carlton with strong showing in third

Justice Carlton had some quality minutes to end the third quarter. She was fouled on a 3 attempt and made 2-for-3 from the line. On the next possession, Me'Arah O'Neal dished out an assist to Carlton who made the tough shot in the lane.

Score isn't good for the West. It trails the East 73-56 heading to the fourth quarter.

Zach Randolph's daughter standing out

Another daughter of a former NBA star is standing out in this one.

Also on the West, Louisville commit Mackenly Randolph has been mixing it up in the paint. Randolph is ranked No. 21 by ESPN is a 6-foot forward out of California and the daughter of Zach Randolph, who played for five different teams in the NBA (Memphis and Portland most notably) after one season at Michigan State.

Zach Randolph was the McDonald'a All-American Game MVP in 2000.

Halftime: East 50, West 34

For the West, Me'Arah O'Neal has six points while Justice Carlton has four. Both future SEC players are contributing.

Houston connection

Justice Carlton dishes out an assist on a bucket by Me'Arah O'Neal down in the paint. The future Florida Gator has six points. West trails 44-32 with under 3 minutes to play.

A couple possessions later, Carlton makes her second shot of the night.

Me'Arah wants to make a 3

Me'Arah O'Neal told the ESPN broadcast team that her goal was to make a 3-pointer in this game. She has the range, but has missed her first attempt. We'll keep you posted.

(Her father was 1-for-22 from downtown in his NBA career)

Ziebell lighting it up

Monday's 3-point shootout champ Allie Ziebell, a UConn commit and the No. 4 recruit on ESPN, drills her second 3 of the game. She's got eight points for the West. The East has seized control of this one early. 37-28 with 6:48 to go before halftime.

O'Neal with the bucket

Two possessions later for the West, we have Me'Arah O'Neal underneath the hoop and the Episcopal star fills it up for her first points.

Her father Shaquille O'Neal is not in the building this evening. NBA on TNT duty.

Carlton is silky smooth

Seven Lakes in the house. 

Justice Carlton with a smooth drive to the lane and she is on the stat sheet with under 4 minutes left in the first quarter. 

Entering the game!

Justice Carlton (No. 30) and Me'Arah O'Neal (No. 13) have entered in at the 4:12 mark of the first quarter. West could use some energy as it trails 23-9.

Of course, it only took ESPN several seconds to cue up the Shaquille O'Neal highlights from the 1989 McDonald's All-American game where he was the MVP from San Antonio Cole.

Cougar ties

Ann Fritz, the girls basketball coach at Blue Valley North High School in Kansas is the head coach of the West.

Fritz is the sister-in-law of brand-new Houston Cougars football coach Willie Fritz.

Off the bench

Both Justice Carlton (Seven Lakes) and Me'Arah O'Neal (Episcopal) will come in off the bench for the West.

We are underway!

Third time in Texas

It's the second year-in-a-row the McDonald's All-American game has taken place in Texas.

It's also just the third time ever in the state.

The first time was 1985 in Dallas.

Of course, Walker Lambiotte was the MVP of that game.

Who's playing?

Houston Chronicle high school coordinator  Jon Poorman broke down last week on who and what to watch for in tonight's McDonald's All-American Game.

The official game rosters can be found here .

Last year's games held in Houston had plenty of star power. Here's a recap of the boys game as well as a recap of the girls game .

Justice will be served

Seven Lakes senior Justice Carlton overcame a serious knee injury this past July.

The dynamic 6-foot-2 forward for the Spartans tore the ACL, MCL, and lateral and medial meniscus in her right knee on July 7 at the Nike EYBL Nationals. 

The future Texas Longhorn made her way back from the injury in 19 weeks to contribute to a successful season for the Spartans, earning her a nomination to McDonald's All-American game.

Carlton is one of two from Houston playing in tonight's McDonald's All-American Game.

Chronicle staff writer Dennis Silva II has Carlton's story here .

O'Neal the real deal

Me'Arah O'Neal does have the famous dad in Shaquille O'Neal, the 1989 Most Valuable Player of the McDonald's All-American Game.

But the state champion Episcopal senior and future Florida Gator has made her own name in cementing herself as one of the most talented high school players in the nation.

O'Neal is one of two from Houston playing in tonight's McDonald's All-American Game.

Chronicle staff writer Dennis Silva II caught up with O'Neal last week .