The type of writing called travel literature or travelogue includes outdoor writing, guidebooks, nature writing, and travel memoirs. Over time, many writers have shared their experiences in this type of writing through various formats, such as poems, books, memoirs, biographies, novels, journals, and online blogs. People have learned more about important events, like slavery in the United States, by reading travel accounts and books. Writers who live in a place or visit from other countries help promote tourism by sharing their travel experiences in books. Some travel writing includes made-up stories inspired by real-life experiences, while others, like guidebooks, only provide true facts about a location. In the past, most travel stories and guides were written in books, but today, many examples of travel literature are found online, such as travel blogs and websites with information about places.
History
Early examples of travel writing include the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (usually thought to be written in the 1st century CE; the author is not certain), Pausanias’ Description of Greece from the 2nd century CE, Safarnama (Book of Travels) by Nasir Khusraw (1003–1077), Journey Through Wales (1191) and Description of Wales (1194) by Gerald of Wales, and the travel journals of Ibn Jubayr (1145–1214), Marco Polo (1254–1354), and Ibn Battuta (1304–1377). These writers recorded their journeys across the known world in detail. As early as the 2nd century CE, Lucian of Samosata wrote about how some travel writers added made-up or exaggerated stories to their works. Travel writing was a common type of writing in medieval Arabic literature.
In China, travel record literature (Chinese: 遊記文學; pinyin: yóujì wénxué) became popular during the Song dynasty (960–1279). Writers like Fan Chengda (1126–1193) and Xu Xiake (1587–1641) included detailed information about geography and landscapes in their works. The Record of Stone Bell Mountain by Su Shi (1037–1101), a famous poet and official, focused on a philosophical and moral message. Chinese travel writing from this time used many styles, such as stories, essays, and diaries, though most were written in prose. Zhou Daguan’s account of Cambodia in the 13th century is an important source about the city of Angkor during its peak.
One of the earliest known examples of traveling for the sake of travel and writing about it is Petrarch’s (1304–1374) climb of Mont Ventoux in 1336. He said he went to the mountain to enjoy the view from the top. He called his companions who stayed below “frigida incuriositas,” meaning “a cold lack of curiosity.” He wrote about his journey, comparing climbing the mountain to his personal growth in life.
Michault Taillevent, a poet for the Duke of Burgundy, traveled through the Jura Mountains in 1430 and wrote about his personal thoughts, his fear of the steep rock faces, and the loud waterfalls. Antoine de la Sale (c. 1388–c. 1462), author of Petit Jehan de Saintre, climbed a volcano in the Lipari Islands in 1407 and described his experience. He said he went because of “councils of mad youth.” In the mid-15th century, Gilles le Bouvier wrote in Livre de la description des pays that he wrote his book because many people enjoy seeing the world and want to learn about it without traveling, or they wish to see it in person.
By the 16th century, travel accounts to India and Persia were common enough to be collected in books like Novus Orbis (“New World”) by Simon Grynaeus, and works by Ramusio and Richard Hakluyt. Travelers to Persia included Robert Shirley and Anthony Shirley, while those to India included Duarte Barbosa, Ralph Fitch, Ludovico di Varthema, Cesare Federici, and Jan Huyghen van Linschoten. European humanist travelers also wrote about their journeys, often describing monuments and inscriptions, such as Seyfried Rybisch’s Itinerarium (1570s), Michel de Montaigne’s Journal de voyage (1581), Germain Audebert’s Voyage d’Italie (1585), and Aernout van Buchel’s Iter Italicum (1587–1588).
In the 18th century, travel writing was often called “books of travels,” which mostly included records of sea voyages. In 18th-century Britain, travel writing was very popular, and many famous writers wrote about their journeys. For example, Gulliver’s Travels (1726) is a social satire inspired by real travel accounts, and Captain James Cook’s diaries (1784) were as popular as today’s best-selling books. Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America (1799–1804), originally written in French, was translated into many languages and influenced scientists like Charles Darwin.
Other examples of travel writing include accounts of the Grand Tour, where wealthy people, including aristocrats and clergy, traveled Europe to study art and architecture. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) helped make travel writing more popular with books like An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879), which introduced hiking and camping as recreational activities. He also described commissioning one of the first sleeping bags.
In the 19th century, notable travel writers included Ivan Goncharov, who wrote about his global journey on the frigate Pallada (1858), and Lafcadio Hearn, who described Japanese culture with care and understanding.
The 20th century’s interwar period saw many famous writers, such as Graham Greene, Robert Byron, Rebecca West, Freya Stark, Peter Fleming, and Evelyn Waugh, travel and write influential books.
In the late 20th century, travel writing became more popular, especially in English-speaking countries, with authors like Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, Jonathan Raban, and Colin Thubron. While travel writing had previously interested historians and biographers, it later became a subject of academic study in its own right.
Travel books
Travel books come in many styles, such as documentary, literary, journalistic, memoir, humorous, or serious. These books are often linked to tourism and include guidebooks. Travel writing can be found on websites, in magazines, on blogs, and in books. Many different people have written about travel, including travelers, military officers, missionaries, explorers, scientists, pilgrims, social and physical scientists, educators, and migrants.
Travelogues are a special type of writing that sometimes is not given enough attention in the literary world. They combine elements of memoir, nonfiction, and sometimes even fiction to create stories that focus on both the journey and the purpose of the trip. People have shared travel stories for a long time, from ancient tales about explorers and pilgrims to modern blogs and vlogs. Travelogues became important in late nineteenth-century newspapers, and they influenced short story writing of that time. Authors like Henry James and Guy de Maupassant often wrote both travelogues and short stories, using the same places as settings.
Travel literature often connects with philosophy or essay writing. For example, V. S. Naipaul’s India: A Wounded Civilization (1976) used his journey to make observations about a country and its people. Similarly, Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) and Robin Esrock’s books about his travels in Canada, Australia, and other places also combine travel with deeper reflections. Fictional stories, such as Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), also show this mix of travel and storytelling.
Sometimes, writers stay in one place for a long time, learning about the local culture while still writing like a travel writer. Examples include Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons (1957), Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (1977) and The Songlines (1987), Deborah Tall’s The Island of the White Cow (1986), and Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence (1989) and its sequels.
Travel and nature writing often overlap in the works of Sally Carrighar, Gerald Durrell, and Ivan T. Sanderson. Sally Carrighar wrote books like One Day at Teton Marsh (1965) and Wild Heritage (1965). Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals (1956) is an autobiographical story about his childhood in Corfu, Greece, and includes descriptions of the island’s wildlife. Ivan T. Sanderson wrote about his expeditions to Africa, the Caribbean, and the Yucatán in books like Animal Treasure, Caribbean Treasure, and Living Treasure. These authors are naturalists who support their scientific work through writing.
Charles Darwin, a famous naturalist, wrote about his travels on the HMS Beagle, combining science, natural history, and travel.
Many well-known writers from other fields have also written about their travels. Examples include Samuel Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), Charles Dickens’ American Notes for General Circulation (1842), Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), Hilaire Belloc’s The Path to Rome (1902), D. H. Lawrence’s Twilight in Italy (1916) and Mornings in Mexico (1927), Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), and John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962).
Gwen Moffat, a British mountaineer and author, wrote novels and memoirs about her life as a mountain guide, the first woman to earn that title. She used diary entries from her travels to write memoirs like Space Below My Feet (1961), On My Own Ground (1964), and Survival Count (1972). She also wrote mystery novels, such as the Miss Pink Mystery Series (1973–2002), which feature a detective solving crimes in different places around the world.
Cees Nooteboom, a Dutch writer, is known for his many travel books, including Roads to Santiago. Other famous travel writers include Eric Newby, H. V. Morton, Bill Bryson, Paul Theroux, Jan Morris, and Robin Esrock. Jan Morris has said she writes about "place" rather than travel itself.
Bill Bryson won the Golden Eagle Award in 2011 and the Durham University library was renamed the Bill Bryson Library in 2012 for his work as a university chancellor. Paul Theroux received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1981 for his novel The Mosquito Coast and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 1989 for Riding the Iron Rooster. Jan Morris was honored with the Golden PEN Award in 2005 for her contributions to literature.
Lucie Azema, a French writer, has noted that most travel writing is done by men, and when women write about travel, their books are often forgotten. She argues that male travel writing can sometimes reflect unequal, colonial, or biased views of the world.
Adventure literature
In the world of sailing, Frank Cowper's Sailing Tours (1892–1896) and Joshua Slocum's Sailing Alone Around the World (1900) are well-known books about outdoor adventures.
Jules Verne's adventure stories are famous examples of adventure literature. Two of his most well-known books are Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days.
Guide books
A guide book or travel guide is "a book of information about a place, designed for the use of visitors or tourists." An early example is Thomas West's guide to the English Lake District, published in 1778. Thomas West, an English priest, made the idea of walking for pleasure more common in his guide to the Lake District of 1778. In the introduction, he wrote that his goal was:
to encourage the taste of visiting the lakes by helping travelers explore the area; for this purpose, the writer has collected and shared all the special viewpoints and places noted by those who have previously traveled to the lakes, confirmed by his own repeated observations.
To achieve this, he included many "stations" or viewpoints around the lakes, where tourists could enjoy the views and learn about their beauty and appearance. Published in 1778, the book was a major success.
Mariana Starke made the standard travel guide more common. This type of guide is a reference book that can include information about places to stay, restaurants, transportation, and activities. Maps of different levels of detail, along with historical and cultural information, are often included. There are many types of guide books, each focusing on different aspects of travel, such as adventure or relaxation, or aimed at travelers with different budgets, or focusing on topics like sexual orientation or types of diet. Travel guides can also be found online in the form of travel websites.
Travel journals
A travel journal, also known as a road journal, is a record created by a traveler, often in diary form, that documents the traveler's experiences during a journey. These records are usually written during the trip and later edited for publication. This format has been used for a long time in writing. One early example is Pausanias, a writer from the 2nd century CE, who wrote Description of Greece based on his own observations. In 1786, James Boswell published The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, and in 1816, Goethe published Italian Journey, which was based on his diaries. In the 1760s, Fray Ilarione da Bergamo and Fray Francisco de Ajofrín wrote travel accounts about colonial Mexico. Fannie Calderón de la Barca, a Scottish-born woman who was the wife of the Spanish ambassador to Mexico from 1839 to 1842, wrote Life in Mexico, a significant travel narrative that includes many observations about daily life in Mexico during her time there.
A British traveler named Mrs. Alec Tweedie published several travelogues, including books about Denmark (1895), Finland (1897), the United States (1913), Mexico (1901, 1906, 1917), and a book about Russia, Siberia, and China (1926). A more recent example is Che Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries. A travelogue can be a film, a book written from a travel diary, or an illustrated talk that describes the experiences and places visited by a traveler. American writer Paul Theroux has written many travel books, with his first successful work being The Great Railway Bazaar.
In addition to published travel journals, archive records show that many travelers historically wrote diaries to record their journeys for personal use, not necessarily for publication. This practice was especially common in 19th-century European travel diaries. Anglo-American writer Bill Bryson is known for A Walk in the Woods, which was later made into a Hollywood film with the same name.
Slave travel narratives
The stories written by escaped slaves about their lives in slavery and their journeys to freedom are a form of travel writing that began in the 18th and 19th centuries. These writings describe how enslaved people in the southern United States and the Caribbean overcame strict laws to escape and find freedom. As John Cox explains in Traveling South, "travel was a necessary step before enslaved people could write about their experiences, because they could not live under slavery and write about it at the same time."
One well-known example is Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, Narrative, which includes his travels. At first, Douglass traveled only when his enslavers allowed him to, but later he traveled freely after escaping. Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave is another example of a travel narrative. Northup was kidnapped and forced into slavery, but he eventually escaped the South’s strict laws and traditions. Harriet Ann Jacobs’s Incidents also includes travel experiences. Jacobs moved short distances to escape harsh living conditions and later traveled to the North to escape slavery entirely.
Fiction
Some fictional travel stories are connected to travel literature. It can be helpful to tell the difference between real and made-up stories in some situations, but this is very hard to do in practice. For example, the travel writings of Marco Polo and John Mandeville are famous cases where this distinction is unclear. Examples of fictional travel literature that are based on real journeys include:
Travel blogs
In the 21st century, travel writing became a type of social media through travel blogs. Travel bloggers use websites like personal blogs, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and travel sites to share information about their trips and give tips for visiting specific countries or traveling in general. Travel blogs were some of the earliest examples of blogs, which started in the mid-1990s. Well-known travel bloggers include Matthew Kepnes, Johnny Ward, and Drew Binsky.
Tourism
Travel literature affects tourism in ways that involve people, money, and nature. These effects can be both good and bad. More people are noticing how tourism influences local areas, especially the environment. This has led researchers to create new methods, like the Diagnostic Journaling Process Model (DJPM), to help people involved in tourism find and support ways to make travel more sustainable through written travel stories.
Scholarship
The organized study of travel literature became an area of academic research in the mid-1990s, with its own meetings, groups, publications, books, collections of writings, and reference works. Important books published before 1995 include Abroad (1980) by Paul Fussell, which looks at how British writers used travel writing as a way to escape reality during the interwar period; Gone Primitive: Modern Intellects, Savage Minds (1990) by Marianna Torgovnick, which examines ideas about primitive cultures in descriptions of foreign lands; Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (1991) by Dennis Porter, which explores how travel relates to the mind and emotions; Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women's Travel Writing by Sara Mills, which explores how gender and colonialism interacted in women's travel writing during the 19th century; Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992) by Mary Louise Pratt, which analyzes how Victorian travel writing spread colonial ideas; and Belated Travelers (1994) by Ali Behdad, which discusses colonial anxiety.
Travel awards
Prizes for travel books are given every year. One example is the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, which was given from 1980 to 2004. Another is the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. The Dolman Best Travel Book Award started in 2006. The Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Awards, which began in 1985, are given by the SATW Foundation. These awards include honors for travel books and guidebooks, as well as recognition for travel writing in newspapers, magazines, websites, and broadcast and visual media formats. They also reward articles in print and online media across many categories. The National Outdoor Book Awards and the Banff Mountain Book Awards also honor travel writing related to outdoor and adventure topics. The North American Travel Journalists Association hosts an annual competition that recognizes travel journalism in many categories, including print and online media.