The ten most influential travel books

William H.H. Murray’s Guide to the Adirondacks “lit a thousand campfires and taught a thousand pens how to write about nature” and inspired legions of American city dwellers to venture into the wild and begin started a back-to-nature movement that continues to this day. Murray's slender volume is, of course, part of a great literary tradition. For more than two thousand years, travel books have had a huge impact on the way we travel around the world, turning once-unremarkable regions into wildly popular destinations.

A detailed selection would fill a library. So here's a cheeky, opinionated short list of travel classics—some infamous, some barely remembered, that inspired armchair travelers to venture out of their fortress areas and hit the road.

1. Herodotus, History (c. 440 BC)

Homer's Odyssey is often called the first travel narrative, creating the archetypal story of a lone wanderer, the Odyssey, in a world rich in mythology A perilous voyage from terrifying monsters like Cyclops, seductive fairies and charming sorcerers. But the first true "travel writer" as we understand it today was the ancient Greek writer Herodotus, who traveled around the Eastern Mediterranean researching his monumental history. His vivid descriptions of ancient Egypt, in particular, create a lasting image of exotic landscapes from the Pyramids to Luxor, and he even tackles classic tourist tribulations such as impulsive tour guides and greedy souvenir vendors. His work inspired legions of other ancient travelers to explore this magical, haunted land, creating a fascination that was revived in the Victorian era and is still with us today. In fact, Herodotus is not only the father of history but also the father of cultural travel, revealing to ancient Greeks who rarely considered foreign societies worthy of attention the rewards of exploring a distant, unfamiliar world.

2. Marco Polo, Marco Polo's Travels (circa 1300)

When the 13th-century Venetian merchant Marco Polo returned home after 20 years of wandering in China, Persia, and Indonesia, he and his two The tales told by the brothers were believed to be complete fiction until (legend has it) the three cut open the hems of their garments and hundreds of gems cascaded down in a glittering waterfall. Still, Polo's adventures might have remained unknown to posterity had it not been for an accident that prevented him from transcending his writer's confinement: imprisoned by the Genoese after a naval battle in 1298, he used his forced leisure time Dictated memoirs to his cellmate, the romantic writer Rasticello da Pisa. The resulting book, filled with fantastic observations about Chinese cities and customs, as well as encounters with Kublai Khan's men in power (and, of course, some outrageous exaggerations), has since become a bestseller and indelibly defined The Western view of the East. There is evidence that Polo intended his book to be a practical guide for future businessmen to follow his path. Christopher Columbus, a fellow Italian eager for adventure, saw China's incredible wealth and was certainly inspired to find a new ocean route to the East. (Of course, *** scholars will point out that the 14th-century explorer Ibn Battuta made three polo voyages across Africa, Asia, and China, but his monumental work The Journey It was not widely known in the West until the mid-19th century).

3. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768),

when the author of Tristram Shandy wrote this While writing this extraordinary autobiographical novel, the rite of passage journey to Europe was in full swing. Wealthy young British aristocrats (almost all men) went on educational expeditions to great cultural sites such as Paris, Venice, Rome, and Naples, seeking out classical ruins and Renaissance art in the company of knowledgeable "bear leaders" or tour guides. . Stern's tumbling book suddenly turned its head on serious grand touring principles. The narrator deliberately avoids all the great monuments and cathedrals and instead embarks on a personal journey to meet unusual people and find new and spontaneous experiences: (“It is a peaceful journey of the soul in pursuit of nature, and She evokes those emotions that make us love each other and the world, and his winding journey through France and Italy is full of interesting encounters, often amorous (including various housemaids and having to live with someone of the opposite sex) hotel room), which foreshadowed the romantic era when travel was a journey of self-discovery, and even today most "real travelers" pride themselves on finding vivid and unique experiences rather than generic tourist snapshots or lazy escapes. . Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad (1869)

Gilded Age writers (a term accidentally coined by Mark Twain) produced thousands of earnest and tedious travel books that Trending Twain deftly deflated innocents abroad As a reporter sent on tours of Europe and the Holy Land, Twain submitted a series of hilarious columns to the Alta Californian newspaper, which he later adapted. of this classic work.

It tugs at the heartstrings with timely, self-deprecating humor, lampooning the naiveté of his fellow Americans ("The gentle reader will never, ever know what he is capable of until he goes abroad") and exploring the complex old The humbling insults of the world ("In Paris, they just open their eyes and stare at us and talk to them in French! We never succeeded in getting these *** to understand their own language.") The result is to make more of our compatriots Bravely cross the pond, immerse yourself in Europe and, more importantly, begin a new style of ic travel writing that is echoed today by hugely popular modern writers such as Bill Bryson . Today, The Innocents Abroad is one of the few travel books from the 19th century that is still read with enthusiasm. (Its perfection, of course, is its crude depiction of Twain's wasted youth as a miner in the wilds of the American West).

5. Norman Douglas, Land of the Sirens (1911)

The Italian island of Capri began to have a reputation for debauchery in Roman times, and by the mid-19th century it attracted free-living artists from the colder north, Writers and happy creatures. (It is said that there are two art capitals in Europe, Paris and Capri). But its modern reputation was sealed by the freelance writer Norman Douglas, whose Siren Land recounted carefree life in southern Italy, "paganism, nudity and "Laughter flourishes there", an image echoed in his 1917 novel South Wind, where the island was called Nepens, after the ancient Greek elixir of forgetfulness. (The Land of the Sirens takes its name from Homer’s The Odyssey; Capri was the home of the Sirens, charming women who used their magical voices to lure sailors to their shipwrecks and deaths). Millions of sun-hungry British readers were seduced by the Mediterranean sensuality and Douglass' humor. (“When one thinks of this,” he writes, “it is rather puzzling to imagine how the sirens of the past might have passed the time in cold storms.”) Modern man will ask for cigarettes, Grand Mani and a pack of cards, and let the wind howl out on its own.”) Douglas himself was a flamboyant gay man who liked to drunkenly prance around the gardens of Capri with vine leaves in his hair. To a large extent. Thanks to his writings, the island entered a new golden age in the 1920s, attracting exiles disillusioned with postwar Europe. Visitors included many of the great British writers who also wrote classics of travel writing. , such as D.H. Lawrence (whose Magical Etruscan Places covers his travels in Italy; Lawrence also showed friends a draft of the torrid Lady Chatterley's Lover while on holiday in Capri in 1926), E.M Forster, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene and W.H. Auden (the famous poet wrote a book about the glacier) for only ￡51.5 million. All of Asia claims to be high on literature, but the Wheelers now help fund a literary institution, the Wheeler Center, in their hometown of Melbourne, Australia, which promotes serious fiction and nonfiction, including Bruce Chatwin, in Patagonia. 1977)

With Paul Theroux's highly entertaining Railway Bazaar, Chatwin's slender, enigmatic work is widely regarded as the rebirth of modern travel writing. The erudite Chatwin, a former art auctioneer at Sotheby's, quit the London Sunday Times via a telegram to the editor and disappeared into a remote part of South America that was little known at the time. In Patagonia, this genre of work first stylistically weaves a personal quest (the search for a piece of skin of a prehistoric mesodon that the author saw as a child), related to the region's most surreal historical episodes, and The style is poetic, crisp, and concise. Chatwin focuses on god-forsaken outposts rather than popular attractions, and he evokes the haunting with cleverly drawn vignettes from the storybook of Patagonia's past. The atmosphere, like how Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kidd lived in a log cabin in southern Argentina, or how the Welsh nationalist colony began in the stormy town of Terrell.

10. Peter Mayle spent a year in Provence (1989),

Mayle talks briskly of his middle age. Deciding to escape dark, dank England and renovating a farmhouse in Ménerbes, a village in southern France, he created an entire subgenre of do-it-yourself travel memoirs filled with charmingly eccentric locals. He also inspired thousands to imitate his life-changing plan, which saw pastoralists flocking to Provence and other sunny pastoral areas in search of rustic fixer-uppers and cheap wine.

Once-impoverished southern France was quickly replaced by retirees from Manchester, Hamburg and Stockholm, helped by lax residency rules from the European Union, discount airlines and France's super fast TGV trains Revered until now as, in the words of one critic, a "bourgeois theme park for foreigners" (Tuscany became equally popular thanks to Frances Mayes's book, The coasts of Spain and Portugal follow). Things got so crowded that Mailer moved out on his own - although he later returned to another small village, Raul Marín, just a stone's throw from his original haunts.

In recent years, Elizabeth Gilbert has achieved great success with Eat Pray Love (2007), and she offers a similar ethos of personal reinvention, inspiring a new wave of travelers to follow her Take the road to the Bali town of Ubud to find spiritual (and romantic) fulfillment

Tony Perrottet, a Smithsonian Magazine contributor and author of five travel books and author of history books including Pagan Festivals: In the Trail of Ancient Roman Travelers and Sinner's Grand Tour: A Journey Through the Heart of Europe's History; tonyperrotte