USA: Travel writing
Edward Abbey The Journey Home . Hilarious accounts of whitewater rafting and desert hiking trips alternate with essays, by the man who inspired the radical environmentalist movement Earth First! All of Abbey's many books, especially Desert Solitaire , a journal of time spent as a ranger in Arches National Park, make great traveling companions.James Agee and Walker Evans Let Us Now Praise Famous Men . A deeply personal but also richly evocative journal of travels through the rural lands of the Depression-era Deep South, complemented by Evans' powerful photographs.
Stephen Brook New York Days, New York Nights . An Englishman's dryly witty impressions of the Big Apple in the 1990s, with chapters on every aspect of the place, from flotation chambers to Jewish restaurants. Brook's Honky Tonk Gelato treats Texas in a similar, if sometimes patronizing vein.
Bill Bryson The Lost Continent . Using his boyhood home of Des Moines in Iowa as a benchmark, the author travels the length and breadth of America to find the perfect small town. Hilarious, if occasionally a bit smug. A Walk in the Woods applies his trademark irony to the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine, but suffers from too much nature and too few quirky characters.
J. Hector St-John de Crèvecoeur Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America . First published in 1782, a remarkable account of the complexities of Revolutionary America.
Robert Frank The Americans . The Swiss photographer's brilliantly evocative portrait of mid-century American life from coast to coast, with striking images contextualized by an introductory essay from Jack Kerouac.
*Ian Frazier Great Plains . An immaculately researched and well-written travelogue containing a wealth of information on the people of the American prairielands from Native Americans to the soldiers who staff the region's many nuclear installations.
Jack Kerouac On the Road . Definitive account of transcontinental Beatnik wanderings, which now reads as a curiously dated period piece. Not as incoherent as you might expect.
James A. MacMahon (ed) Audubon Society Nature Guides . Attractively produced, fully illustrated and easy-to-use guides to the flora and fauna of seven different US regional ecosystems, covering the entire country from coast to coast and from grasslands to glaciers.
Virginia and Lee McAlester A Field Guide to American Houses . Well-illustrated and engaging guide to America's rich variety of domestic architecture, from pre-colonial to postmodern.
Melanie McGrath Motel Nirvana . Entertaining account of a British traveler's experiences in the Southwest, with some enjoyable swipes at various New-Age nonsense.
John McPhee Encounters with the Arch Druid . In three interlinked narratives, environmental activist and Friends of the Earth founder David Brower confronts developers, miners and dam builders, while trying to protect three different American wilderness areas - the Atlantic shoreline, the Grand Canyon and the Cascades of the Pacific Northwest.
William Least Heat Moon Blue Highways . Account of a mammoth loop tour of the US by back roads, in which the author interviews ordinary people in ordinary places. A good overview of rural America, with lots of interesting details on Native Americans. His next book, Prairyerth , opted for the microcosmic approach, taking six hundred loving pages over the story of Chase County, Kansas.
Jonathan Raban Old Glory . A somewhat pompous though always interesting account of Raban's journey on a small craft down the Mississippi River from the head-waters in Minnesota to the bayous of Louisiana.
Bernard A Weisberger (ed) The WPA Guide to America . Prepared during the New Deal as part of a make-work program for writers, these guides paint a fairly comprehensive portrait of 1930s and earlier America. Also available are state-by-state guides, most of them out of print but easily found in US libraries and secondhand bookshops.
Edmund White States of Desire: Travels in Gay America . A revealing account of life in gay communities across the country, focusing heavily on San Francisco and New York.
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