Niland's Favorite Travel Literature

A Short Review of Niland's Favorite Travel Literature (strictly personal taste!)

I have been reading travel literature for the past twenty-five years. Many of my favorite authors feel like old friends, people whose tastes and styles have come to form the basis on which I think about the experience of traveling and the world. These writers are more than guides, although their insights serve that function, too. Their writing is as much about themselves as it is about the traveling. Countries or cities are just the backdrops—the excuse—for writing about their experiences. Some delve broadly into history; others into people.; and others into vivid descriptions of landscape and geography. All leave the reader with a deep impression of time and place and circumstance and the passion each author feels for his destination. The greatest of these books are far more than travel logs or memoirs of traveling or catalogues of taste. They are about coming of age, whether in the first excitement of youth or in the passing of years or even the end of traveling.

Some of the books I describe here are classics of the genre, recognizable to anyone with a passing interest in the literature of travel. I apologize for their obviousness. Some are out of print and therefore hard to find. Coupled with my love of reading travel writing is the excitement of finding old favorites and new discoveries in old and second hand bookstores. I head first for the travel section in any bookstore I come across.

More often than not my favorite travel writers tend to be English and male. Others have noted this predilection in the genre. Maybe it is the combination of the English having a long and storied heritage of exploration coupled with the relative safety of the lone male traveler. There are, in fact, great women travelers—Freya Stark and Jan Morris to name two.

My list is in somewhat my order of preference and focuses primarily on 20th century writing. By and large I have favorite authors, all of whose books are favorites and therefore recommended. In a few cases I list one-offs, either because the author only wrote one travel book or, more likely, I just haven't read his other work. There is so much yet to discover!



My list has to begin with the English writer Patrick Leigh-Fermor, because not only is he one of my very favorite travel writers—elevating travel writing to lush, language rich, literature—but he has written my favorite book of any genre, A Time of Gifts.

Just before the breakout of WWII, and still a teenager, Patrick Leigh-Fermor set out on a walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. The record of this stupendous adventure is set out in three volumes, two of which have been published, the third his fans around the world still await. The first volume is A Time of Gifts; the second is Through the Woods and Water. (Both are available in Penguin and NYRB paperbacks.) His story records not just the people and places he encountered, all fantastic, but the passing of Old Europe under the shadow of war and a changed world as then unglimpsed. It’s the story of his own growing up, too, the beginning of his life-long passion for travel and foreign places.

Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s second great experience was during WWII while hiding out in Greece as an English officer on the side of the partisans during the Nazi occupation. This led to his two wonderful books about Greece, Mani and Roumeli. He lives in Greece to this day. All of his other books are good, too, but these are my favorites. Anthony Lane wrote a wonderful Profile of Patrick Leigh-Fermor in The New Yorker, well worth finding.

Before I talk about three more favorite authors I want to mention two single books that rank highly in my pantheon. The first is The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (the greatest piece of travel writing according to Paul Fussell) and The Way of the World (L’Usage de Monde) by the French travel writer Nicolas Bouvier. Both are literary masterpieces and completely one with the personalities of their authors. I love both of these books and would take them on my own desert island. Both are set in the near east, The Road to Oxiana in Afghanistan and The Way of the World, beginning in Macedonia and Thrace, then mostly in Iran and the other”–stans”-though long before the present troubles.

The Road to Oxiana is not hard to find, but I rarely ever see The Way of the World in bookstores, although it is available in paperback from The Marlboro Press. Nicolas Bouvier is a noted travel writer but The Way of the World is the one of his few translated into English.

The travel writer whose overall body of work I cherish, and feel closest to as a real companion, is H. V. Morton. Morton was born in 1982 in Birmingham, England and died in 1979 in South Africa, where he lived at the end of his long and prolific life. He began his career as a newspaper reporter and his first books, on London, began appearing in 1925. He is, almost without equal, one of the great travelers of the 20th century. His books are incredibly rich in history and detail and even his loyal adherence to the traditions of God, Queen and Country is charming, never cloying.

His work falls into sets. First there are the many volumes about London (In Search of London—written just after WWII and filled with both the sadness of what was lost and the joy of how the spirit of the English people prevailed). Then, there are the other “In Search of” titles: In Search of England, In Search of Ireland, In Search of Wales, In Search of Scotland, In Search of South Africa.

He wrote three classic ooks about Italy: A Traveler in Italy, A Traveler in Southern Italy, and A Traveler in Rome. All are wonderful and indispensable on any trip.

In similar vein is his A Traveler in Spain, possibly my favorite book on that country.

Last are his books based on travels in the Middle East, with a religious background:
In the Steps of the Master, Through Lands of the Bible, and In the Steps of Saint Paul.
No one has ever brought to life the history, landscape and people of these Biblical lands better than H. V. Morton.

For many years all of H. V. Morton was out-of-print, but recently some of the titles have been re-issued in paperback and are generally stocked in the Border’s of the world. I collect H. V. Morton and have over thirty volumes to date, but am still looking! I read the recent biography of Morton and it turns out he wasn't an especially nice man.

Next are two more well-known English travel writers, Colin Thubron and Jan Morris. Thubron’s titles include In Siberia (his most recent), The Lost Heart of Asia, Journey into Cyprus, The Hills of Adonis (about Lebanon), Mirror to Damascus, among others. All excellent.

Jan Morris is, of course, one of the most famous of the group, not just because she is a wonderful travel writer, but also because she began her writing career as James Morris and later underwent a sex change. (I remember seeing her interviewed on the old Dick Cavet show. Apparently one of the ground rules had been not to discuss the operation, but DC did and she stormed off the set in a fury.)

One of her (his) first and most charming books is Coronation Everest. James Morris was sent by the London Times to Nepal to report on the ascent of Mt. Everest by Edmund Hillary. This was, I think, 1952. At the time there was both a fierce national competition among the mountain climbing nations to reach the top and a fierce competition among newspapers to be the first to break the story. Morris’s tale is full of drama and suspense and sweet nationalism, capped by the fact his story broke on the morning of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in London.

Many books have followed. One favorite is Venice—more information about the serene city than you could imagine. Her most recent book, which she says is her last, is Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. Jan Morris’s essays are also excellent, most of which are collected in various volumes such as Journeys and Destinations. Her work is easy to find in decent bookstores.

Talking about Jan Morris leads me to another group of travel books of recent times published by National Geographic until the general imprint of National Geographic Directions. Jan Morris wrote one of the first in the series, entitled A Writer’s House in Wales. Others in the series that I have read (and there are many I have yet to read) include Barry Unsworth’s Crete, W. S. Merwin’s The Mays of Ventador, and Oliver Sacks’ Oaxaca Journal—his wonderful account of collecting ferns with the New York Fern Society in Mexico.

Bloomsbury is also publishing travel books by famous authors—their series is called The Writer and the City—and, again, the writing is very high caliber and the cities interesting.
So far I have read Edmund White’s The Flaneur on Paris, Peter Carey’s Thirst Days in Sydney, and John Banville’s Prague Pictures. Sitting next to me right now is Ruy Castro's Rion de Janeiro.

I mentioned the poet W. S. Merwin above. He also wrote another classic account of life in France called The Lost Upland.

And speaking of France, among my favorite books on that country are three by Freda White, organized around the major river systems. They are Ways of Aquitaine, West of the Rhone and Three Rivers of France. These are not travelogues, per se, but lyrical descriptions of rural France not often visited by foreigners.

And who could love France and not also love the books by M.F.K.Fisher set there? Two Towns in Provence or Long Ago in France, among others.

Or A. J.Leibling's wonderful account of over eating in Parisian restaurants before the war, Between Meals. Or Waverly Root’s classic The Foods of France (to be read after his even more classic account The Foods of Italy.) Or Roy Andries de Groot’s The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth—the story of a country inn in the French Alps run by two sisters who cook meals of such perfection that de Groot has been long accused by passing fiction off as fact.

Another contemporary writer well worth your reading time is Pico Iyer. Start with his earliest Video Nights in Kathmandu and then move on to more recent Falling Off the Map, Sun After Dark, or The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto.

There are, surprisingly, not a lot of travel books on Japan. There are the classics of the late 19th century by Lafcadio Hearne. More current classics include two by Oliver Statler, Japanese Inn and Japanese Pilgrimage. Both are beautiful descriptions of the essence of traditional Japanese values and life. From 1986, there is Alan Booth's tale of a 2000 mile walk through Japan entitled The Roads to Sata.

Some other favorites that I don’t mean to be relegating nearer the end of my list because they are great books, top examples of their genre and of the countries they describe:

Italian Days by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison.

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West .

Fabled Shore by Rose Macaulay.

Peter Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli.

D. H. Lawrence's Twilight in Italy.

Gerald Brenan's The Face of Spain or South from Granada.

Everything by Bruce Chatwin, especially In Patagonia or Songlines.

A River in Time by Jon Swain—a bittersweet and nostalgic memoir of Viet Nam and Cambodia during and just after the war.

Robert Hughes’ great account of Australia The Fatal Shore.

For something closer to home—and my home county—Alex Shoumatoff’s book about Westchester County, NY entitled just Westchester.

Triste Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss.

Old Calabria by Norman Douglas.

Reflections on Blue Water by Alan Ross.

All of Lawrence Durrell’s work on Greece, but in particular Bitter Lemons, Prospero’s Cell, and Reflections on a Marine Venue. Henry Miller's The Colossus of Marousi.

Jonathan Keats’s book on Italy-- Italian Journey.

V. S. Naipaul’s two books on India, An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilisation or his book on the American South, A Turn in the South; or, his book on the lands of Islam Among the Believers.


Recently I just read Simon Winchester’s account of traveling to all the remote, remaining outposts of the British Empire, entitled appropriately, Outposts, and enjoyed it thoroughly. I never before longed to go to the Falkalnd Island or St. Helena, but I do now. Winchester's books on Korea and China are equally fine.



Lists are both self-serving and self-limiting. By writing down these books I remember an equal number I am leaving out. Some that I left out, but love, are not quite travel books, such as Kinta Beevor’s A Tuscan Childhood. These are books of place more than books of travel. V. S. Pritchett’s work on Spain is another example. Or, Iris Origo's poignant account of her life in Italy during WWII, War in Val D'Orcia.

And, I just remembered, I forgot all of Bill Bryson! A Walk in the Woods is one of the funniest travel accounts in print. And, having lived in Australia for three years, Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country captured the country with droll perfection. Funnily enough, once when we lived there and were driving from Melbourne in the far south to a beach resort in northern New South Wales, we read Bryson’s The Lost Continent out loud and were rolling with laughter.

And then there are Freya Stark and Norman Lewis and Eric Newby... three all time greats, each deserving a tribute of their own.

So, with the time to read all of these and with luck in finding some of them, you will be well on your way to being a connoisseur of travel literature. Have fun!