The best US travel writing chosen by a travel writer

The greatest living travel writer? In my opinion, yes, and his books get better and better. After enjoying his adventures all over the world it was fascinating to see him turn to his own country. He originally intended to drive to the Deep South once in each season of the year, but the conditions and people he encountered kept him going back for much longer. It’s a raw portrait of a part of America that is poorer than many third-world countries but is also rich in history, in compassion, in music, in food, and in characters. Theroux’s gift, as with all the best travel writing, is that he listens to them. I’ve traveled a lot in the Deep South myself, but not to the places that Theroux uncovers.

The fact that this book has stayed in print since it first came out in 1982 is a testament to its timelessness. It’s a classic of travel writing about the USA. The author sets off on a journey along America’s back roads with no other purpose than to explore the unknown, including discovering the history of those US places that have strange names, from Why in Arizona to Whynot in Mississippi. He describes an America that is filled with character, and with characters, and he writes about both it and them in thoughtful prose. Finding it on the bookshelves and re-reading it again recently, it made me want to jump in the car and go wherever the road took me.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to see deeper into a country. Raban was a respected English novelist and critic when he moved to the USA and settled there – something I would later do myself. He proceeded to produce a series of brilliantly vivid travel books about his new homeland, of which this was the first. Avoiding the inevitable road trip (though he did those later), he takes a motorboat for a solo journey down the Mississippi River. Long periods alone allow him the chance to reflect on the river, nature, and the USA, but he also has lively encounters with the people who live by the river, revealing their passions and their pains.

Before I went to Alaska for the first time, I did some background reading and thankfully discovered this book and the writing of John McPhee. He and Alaska were made for each other. He’s the kind of writer who is interested in everything, and everyone, and conveys his curiosity and his discoveries with enthusiasm. Alaska is unique, as is McPhee’s style of writing, jumping from topic to topic as the mood – and his journey – takes him, and hauling the reader along with him. He’s the kind of traveling companion who’s forever saying: let’s see what’s down there, I wonder how that works, let’s go talk to that guy.

I still recall reading Of Mice and Men in one sitting in my bedroom as a teenager. It was the start of a lifelong passion for Steinbeck that has never wavered. In 1960 he set off in a camper van with his poodle Charley to re-discover his own country. He leaves his Long Island home in a raging storm and traces a circular route across to the Pacific Northwest, down to California and Salinas where he was born, and back through Texas and the south. The Nobel Prize-winning novelist pitches up at campsites and chews the fat with whoever he meets, and even the later discovery that chunks of the book were fictionalized didn’t take away my admiration for the journey and the telling of it.