By period

20th-Century Travel Narratives

At the start of the twentieth century, the map of the world had almost no blank spaces left, except at the poles, in the heart of Arabia and on the high plateaus of Asia. Yet travel changed its nature once again: the Trans-Siberian Railway linked Moscow to the Pacific, ocean liners became floating palaces, and the automobile and the airplane joined the race. This collection focuses mainly on the first half of the century, and on authors who died more than seventy years ago, whose works have entered the public domain.

The poles opened the heroic age of exploration. The American Robert Peary claimed to have reached the North Pole in 1909, a claim still disputed. The Norwegian Roald Amundsen planted his flag at the South Pole on 14 December 1911; the Briton Robert Falcon Scott arrived five weeks later and died on the way back with his companions, and his journal, found in their tent, turned failure into an epic. From 1914 to 1916, Ernest Shackleton's crew survived the loss of the Endurance, crushed by the ice of the Weddell Sea.

In Central Asia, scholars took over from the agents of the Great Game. The Swede Sven Hedin mapped Tibet and the Taklamakan Desert; in 1907 and 1908, Aurel Stein and then Paul Pelliot carried off thousands of manuscripts from the Dunhuang caves, something China still holds against them. In Arabia, Gertrude Bell pushed as far as the oasis of Ha'il in 1914; during the war, T. E. Lawrence joined the Arab Revolt; in the winter of 1930-1931, Bertram Thomas became the first to cross the Rub' al-Khali, the Empty Quarter, by camel.

Africa was now colonial, and travel there took other forms. In 1924-1925, Citroën's Croisière noire crossed the continent in half-track vehicles, from Algeria to Madagascar, with a painter and a filmmaker on board. Writers exposed what the administration preferred to hide: André Gide denounced the concession companies of the Congo in 1927, Albert Londres forced labor in 1929. Earlier, Isabelle Eberhardt, a convert to Islam, had roamed southern Algeria dressed as a horseman until her death in 1904. In the air, the Aéropostale linked France to Dakar and then to South America, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry drew from his flights over the Sahara and the Andes books that changed the way people saw the Earth. For the wealthy, the round-the-world cruise became a pastime.

The audience had never been so wide. Expeditions were funded by newspapers buying exclusive rights to the story, by lecture tours and soon by cinema; photography became proof, and the great reportage became a genre. But the new ethnography, which required living for a long time among the people one described, as Bronisław Malinowski did in the Trobriand Islands during the First World War, showed how little fast travel really saw. Many of these accounts carry the outlook of the colonial age; they remain witnesses to a world in which one could still claim to be the first.

This collection brings together our editions of narratives from the first half of the twentieth century and a directory of related texts, to follow the moment when exploration came to an end and modern travel began.

Our titles on this subject

20th century

Journey to Europe

Jurji Zaydan, 1861-1914

Two years before he died, al-Hilal's founder tours 1912 Europe and measures it against the Arab world.

In the summer of 1912, Jurji Zaydan, a Lebanese writer based in Cairo and founder of the journal al-Hilal, observes France, England and Switzerland. His book reverses the usual gaze of the travel narrative: it is the East that examines Europe, its governments, schools, theaters, women and museums, to decide what is worth taking from it. A rare testimony on the Belle Époque Europe of the eve of 1914, seen by a leading figure of the Nahda.

Journey to China

Indumadhab Mallick, 1904-1905

Via Rangoon and Malaya, a Bengali reaches Qing China in the midst of the Russo-Japanese War.

In 1904-1905, Indumadhab Mallick, a scholar and man of letters from Calcutta, follows the steamer route through Rangoon, Penang, Singapore and Hong Kong to Amoy, in the midst of the Russo-Japanese War. The historian Narayan C. Sen sees in it perhaps the first direct account of China written for Bengali readers. It is a rare Indian, rather than European, view of colonial Asia: coolies, women, opium, Qing China after the Boxers, and a meditation on the decline of Asia before Europe.

The Journey of Prince Mohammed Ali Pasha to North America

Muhammad Ali Pasha (1875-1955), 1912

Brother of the khedive, Egypt's Prince Muhammad Ali sets out to discover the United States.

In 1912, the year of the Titanic, Prince Muhammad Ali, brother of the khedive of Egypt, crosses the United States, Alaska and Canada in three months, from New York to the glaciers of Sitka and the rapids of the St. Lawrence. His account, written in Arabic and dated day by day, casts an Egyptian eye on industrial America: liners, slaughterhouses, gold mines, national parks, Indian reservations and the Syrian colony of New York, always measured against Egypt and the East.

Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme

Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.

Robert Falcon Scott, The Voyage of the Discovery (1905)

Back in England in September 1904, Robert Falcon Scott tells the story of the Discovery expedition, three years spent in the Ross Sea, on the edge of the Antarctic continent. We follow the wintering in the polar night, the first sledge trials, the dogs dying one by one, and the march south of Scott, Wilson and Shackleton, who in December 1902 reached a latitude never approached before, followed by a return ravaged by scurvy. The book appeared in 1905: while Europe launched its assault on the poles, a Bengali discovered the open sea and the peoples of East Asia for the first time.
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Isabelle Eberhardt, Dans l'ombre chaude de l'Islam (1906)

In 1903 and 1904, Isabelle Eberhardt, born in Geneva and a convert to Islam, rides through the Sud-Oranais, on the borders of Algeria and Morocco, dressed as an Arab horseman. She stays at the zawiya of Kenadsa, shares the life of nomads, soldiers and Sufi scholars, and records the light, the hunger, the prayer and the slowness of days in the ksour. She died in the flood at Ain Sefra in October 1904; her notes, published in 1906 by Victor Barrucand, the same year as Mallick's Journey to China, offer another view from within, tender and uneasy, of a land subject to Europe.
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Gertrude Bell, Syria: The Desert and the Sown (1907)

In early 1905, while Asian steamers carry Mallick toward China, the Englishwoman Gertrude Bell sets out from Jerusalem on horseback, crosses the Jordan and heads north to the Druze Mountain, Damascus, Aleppo and Antioch. She sleeps in Bedouin tents, talks with sheikhs, notables and Ottoman officials, records Roman and Byzantine ruins, and carefully notes what each person tells her of his world. Like the Bengali traveler, she listens more than she judges, and her book paints an old empire, the Ottoman Empire, on the eve of great upheavals, in striking echo of Cixi's waning China.
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Roald Amundsen, Nordvestpassagen (1907)

From 1903 to 1906, the Norwegian Roald Amundsen steers the Gjøa, a converted small fishing boat, through the Northwest Passage that European sailors had sought for centuries. He winters at length in a cove on King William Island, among the Netsilik Inuit, from whom he learns the use of furs, dogs and igloos, while measuring the position of the magnetic pole. While Mallick marvels at the vigor of Chinese coolies and the energy of the Japanese, Amundsen admires the ingenuity of peoples Europe considered primitive: two travelers who learn from others instead of despising them.
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Hiram Bingham, The Journal of an Expedition across Venezuela and Colombia, 1906-1907 (1909)

In 1906 and 1907, the young American academic Hiram Bingham, who would make Machu Picchu known in 1911, crosses Venezuela and Colombia by mule to follow the route of Bolívar's 1819 march, through the llanos and the Andes, to the battlefields of Boyacá and Carabobo. He describes fevers, flooded rivers, poor villages, broken roads and the hospitality of the haciendas. Like Mallick before annexed Burma or humiliated China, he reads each landscape with a history book in hand, that of independence won, past greatness and a fragile present.
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Muhammad Labib al-Batanuni, Le Voyage au Hedjaz (al-Rihla al-Hijaziyya) (1909-1910)

In the winter of 1909, two years before the prince set sail for New York, his brother Khedive Abbas II performed the pilgrimage to Mecca. Muhammad Labib al-Batanuni was part of the journey and drew from it a substantial book published in Cairo in 1911: the crossing of the Red Sea, Jeddah, the rites, Medina, but also the figures, the roads, the finances and the brand-new Hejaz Railway. The same court, the same generation of Egyptian travellers steeped in statistics and reform: heading east, the pilgrim measures the holy cities; heading west, the prince measures Chicago. Two Egyptian gazes questioning progress at the same moment.
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Theodore Roosevelt, African Game Trails (1910)

In April 1909, barely out of the White House, Theodore Roosevelt lands at Mombasa for a Smithsonian collecting expedition. For nearly a year he crosses what is now Kenya and Uganda, then goes down the Nile to Khartoum, with his son Kermit, porters by the hundreds and thousands of specimens destined for American museums. African Game Trails, published in 1910, mixes hunting tales, naturalist's notes and colonial self-assurance. It is the other face of the Europe and America that Zaydan looks at in 1912: the one that classifies, collects and administers the world. The chapter of his Journey on English colonization takes on a particular relief beside it.
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Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World (1910-1913)

In 1910, Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova expedition set out to conquer the South Pole. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the youngest in the party, recounts in this book published in 1922 the polar night, the winter journey to the emperor penguins of Cape Crozier and the discovery, in November 1912, of the tent where Scott and his companions lay. While the prince admired the glaciers of Alaska from the deck of a tourist steamer in the summer of 1912, Cherry-Garrard and his comrades were still awaiting the return of men already dead of cold at the other end of the world. The same year, two faces of ice: comfortable spectacle in the north, mortal ordeal in the south.
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Gertrude Bell, Amurath to Amurath (1911)

The opposite movement to Zaydan's: an Englishwoman heading east. In 1909 Gertrude Bell goes down the Euphrates from Aleppo, records the ruins of Mesopotamia, pushes on to Baghdad, then returns up the Tigris and across Anatolia. An archaeologist and Arabist, she observes the tribes, the Ottoman officials and the tremors of the Young Turk revolution with an unindulgent curiosity. Her book appeared in 1911, the very year the author of Journey to Europe was about to pass judgment on London. To read the two together is to see the same century from both ends of the telescope: Europe studying the East, the East studying Europe, each convinced of finding a lesson there.
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Le Corbusier, Journey to the East (1911)

In 1911, a young Swiss man of twenty-three, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, not yet known as Le Corbusier, set off with a friend on a long journey through Vienna, Budapest, the Balkans, Constantinople, Mount Athos, Athens and Italy. His notebooks, published only in 1966, look at houses, mosques, cafés and the Acropolis with the eye of an architect in the making. The following year the prince travels the opposite way: the Easterner discovers the skyscrapers of Manhattan and the giant hotels of Chicago, while the Westerner goes East to learn the lesson of geometry and light. Two crossed journeys, on the eve of the wars that would undo the Ottoman Empire.
Roald Amundsen, Le Pôle Sud (1912)

While Zaydan prepares his methodical examination of a self-assured Europe, a Norwegian has just handed it one of its last triumphs. Setting out with the Fram in 1910, Amundsen winters on the Ross Ice Barrier, then races south with his sledges and dogs, which he sacrifices one by one according to a coldly calculated plan. On 14 December 1911 he plants his flag at the Pole, beating Scott. His sober, technical account celebrates organization, foresight and discipline: exactly the virtues Zaydan admires in Europeans, carried here to the end of the habitable world, where there is nothing left to civilize.
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Fridtjof Nansen, Through Siberia, the Land of the Future (1913)

In the summer of 1913, Fridtjof Nansen boarded the steamer Correct to open a sea route through the Kara Sea to the mouth of the Yenisei, then travelled up the river and across Siberia to Vladivostok. He observed the forests, the settlers' villages and the indigenous peoples, and saw in these vast expanses a land of the future, just as people then spoke of the American West. The parallel with the prince is direct: the same fascination with the railway that opens up a continent, the same attention to the first peoples pushed back by colonisation, one in Siberia, the other among the Indians of Arizona and Alaska, only a year apart.
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Vilhjalmur Stefansson, My Life with the Eskimo (1913)

From 1908 to 1912, the Canadian-American anthropologist Stefansson lives in the Canadian Arctic, hunting with the Inuit, sharing their food and their snow houses, learning their language. From the Coronation Gulf region he brings back descriptions of communities almost unknown to Europeans until then, and a credo: one can live off the country if one agrees to imitate those who inhabit it. His book appeared in 1913, barely a year after Zaydan's return. At bottom the two men ask the same question from opposite shores: what must a people borrow from another, and what must it keep of itself so as not to be lost?
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Rabindranath Tagore, Japan-Jatri (1919)

In May 1916, Rabindranath Tagore, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature three years earlier, leaves Calcutta aboard the Tosa Maru, a small Japanese cargo ship, and follows Mallick's route through Rangoon and the seas of Asia to Japan. His travel letters, first published in Bengali magazines and collected in 1919 as Japan-Jatri, tell of the storm in the Bay of Bengal, the deck passengers who came aboard at Rangoon, then a country that modernized without giving up its beauty. Twelve years after Mallick, another Bengali looks at East Asia as a mirror held up to India, between admiration for the energy of peoples and unease before the European model.
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Hiram Bingham, Inca Land (1922)

In July 1911, a year before Zaydan's European summer, a Yale academic climbs through the Andean jungle and discovers, beneath the vegetation, the terraces of Machu Picchu. Inca Land gathers Bingham's explorations in the Peruvian highlands: vine bridges over the Apurimac, exhausted mules, Quechua guides, altitude sickness and ruins he believes to be the last Inca capital. Like Zaydan at the Louvre or the British Museum, Bingham asks what a civilization leaves behind and who has the right to tell its story. But he looks for a lost past, while the Levantine scrutinizes a triumphant present.
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Georges Duhamel, America the Menace: Scenes from the Life of the Future (1928)

In 1928, Georges Duhamel crossed the Atlantic and spent a few weeks in the United States. He brought back Scenes from the Life of the Future, published in 1930, an indictment of a civilisation of machines, advertising and standardisation. The Chicago slaughterhouses, the cinema, the motor car, the hurried crowd: Duhamel often pauses before the same sights as the prince and sees in them the threat of a mechanical future for Europe. The comparison sheds light on both books: the Egyptian prince is irritated by the noise and the advertisements but admires the organisation, whereas the French writer, sixteen years later, sees in it little more than servitude.
William Somerset Maugham, The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930)

In 1922 and 1923, William Somerset Maugham lands at Rangoon, travels through Burma to Mandalay, then goes by mule to the Shan States and the Siamese border, before continuing through Bangkok and Cambodia to Haiphong. His account, published in 1930, mixes river and jungle landscapes, chance encounters, small portraits of British officials and stranded adventurers, and reflections on the art of travel. It revisits the British Burma that Mallick had observed a generation earlier, with its pagodas, monks and bazaars, this time through the eyes of an Englishman ironic and clear-sighted about the colonial world to which he belongs.
George Orwell, Dans la dèche à Paris et à Londres (1933)

Zaydan compared Paris and London from the standpoint of the educated visitor, among museums, parliaments and schools. Orwell, twenty years later, goes down a floor, then several. In 1928 and 1929 he works as a dishwasher in the kitchens of a grand Parisian hotel near the Concorde, then in a Russian restaurant; back in England, he drifts from hostel to night shelter around London. Published in 1933, his first book describes the exact reverse of the facades the Levantine writer admired. He does not contradict Zaydan: he completes him, showing what European order costs at the bottom of the ladder.
Henri Michaux, Un barbare en Asie (1933)

In 1930 and 1931, the Belgian poet Henri Michaux travels through India, Southeast Asia, China and Japan. A Barbarian in Asia, published in 1933, is nothing like a guidebook: it is a series of vivid, partial notes on gestures, faces, crowds, theater, writing and religions. Like Mallick before the Chinese of Hong Kong and Amoy, Michaux marvels at Chinese energy and restraint, wonders about the place of women and the power of written characters, and constantly compares what he sees with his own world, with a humor that spares no one, not even himself.
Tawfiq al-Hakim, Usfur min al-Sharq (Un moineau d'Orient) (1938)

The young Egyptian Tawfiq al-Hakim arrives in Paris in 1925 to prepare a doctorate in law; he spends his evenings mostly at the theater and the Opera, and returns to Cairo in 1928 without a degree but determined to transform the Arab stage. Ten years later he draws a novel from those years: Muhsin, his double, discovers the city, falls in love with a Parisian and runs up against the materialism of the industrial West. It is Zaydan's question taken up by the next generation, with less admiration and more unease: what should the East take from Europe, and what does it risk losing there?
Stefan Zweig, Le Monde d'hier. Souvenirs d'un Européen (1942)

The world Zaydan visits in 1912, Zweig knew from the inside, and he saw it die. Written in exile and published in 1942, after the author's suicide, these memoirs return to his stays in Paris before 1914, to London, where he settled in the 1930s, and to Switzerland, refuge of pacifists during the Great War. Zweig paints the Europe of security, libraries and travel without passports, the same one the Levantine inventories, curious and trusting. Read after Journey to Europe, the book gives its tragic sequel: what Zaydan offered as a model to the East was to tear itself apart two years later.
Simone de Beauvoir, America Day by Day (1947)

From January to May 1947, Simone de Beauvoir travelled the United States on a lecture tour: New York, Chicago, where she met Nelson Algren, the journey west, California, the deserts and Indian villages of the Southwest, then the South. America Day by Day, published in 1948, keeps the diary of those months with eager curiosity and a critical eye on money and segregation. Thirty-five years after the prince, she finds the same trains, outsized hotels and Broadway crowds, and in turn raises the question of the place given to Black people and Indians in American power, with a woman's freedom that the prince had observed in American women.
Sayyid Qutb, The America I Have Seen (1948-1950)

From late 1948 to 1950, the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, then an official of the Ministry of Public Instruction, studied in the United States, notably in Greeley, Colorado, and then in California. He drew from it a series of articles, The America I Have Seen, published in Cairo in 1951. The text is severe: materialism, morals, brutal sport, racism. Read alongside the prince, it traces an Egyptian tradition of looking at America. Colorado is the same, and so are the questions, women's freedom, advertising, the place of non-whites, but the admiration of 1912 has given way to rejection, and Qutb would become one of the leading thinkers of the Muslim Brotherhood.
John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley (1960)

In the autumn of 1960, John Steinbeck fitted out a camper truck, took along his poodle Charley and toured the United States to rediscover the country he wrote about. Travels with Charley, published in 1962, follows a road that often crosses the prince's: Niagara Falls, where a problem with the dog's vaccination certificate makes him give up on Canada, Chicago, the Rockies, Seattle, Oregon and the California of his youth. He finds a country transformed by the automobile, waste and concrete, anxious about its own uniformity. Half a century after 1912, the progress the Egyptian traveller admired shows its other side.
Ernest Hemingway, Paris est une fête (1964)

A decade after Zaydan, Paris has changed its face but not its pull. From 1921 to 1926, the young Hemingway lives there poorly with his wife Hadley, writes in the cafés of Montparnasse, borrows books from Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company, and sees Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Scott Fitzgerald. Written late in his life and published in 1964 after his death, these memories make the city a school of writing and discipline. Zaydan saw in Paris the capital of taste and advertising; the American finds in it the capital of fruitful hunger and the true sentence. Two foreigners, two lessons from the same city.
Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar (1975)

In 1973, the American Paul Theroux leaves Victoria Station in London and reaches Tokyo almost entirely by train, through Iran, Afghanistan, India, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam, before returning on the Trans-Siberian. His book, published in 1975, has become a classic of modern travel writing: compartment companions, platform conversations, rails crossing countries at war or on their last legs. Seventy years after Mallick, the same mosaic of peoples parades between Rangoon and Singapore, and the same taste for portraits caught on the fly, tender or cruel, holds the whole narrative together.
John McPhee, Coming into the Country (1977)

Coming into the Country, published in 1977, is John McPhee's great book on Alaska. In it he follows naturalists along Arctic rivers, investigates the plan to move the capital away from Juneau, then settles among the gold seekers and trappers of the upper Yukon, around Eagle. Sixty years after the prince passed through, Alaska is no longer a cruise of glaciers and totem poles but a state where nature conservation, native rights and a still lively dream of gold collide. As for the Treadwell mine, visited in detail in 1912, it collapsed beneath the sea in 1917.
Jan Morris, Hong Kong (1988)

Jan Morris, who had covered the conquest of Everest in 1953 for the British press, devoted a major book to Hong Kong in 1988, nine years before its handover to China. She tells of the colony's birth after the Opium War, the rule of the great trading houses, the sampans of the harbor, the Peak and its villas, Kowloon and the frontier, and the Chinese crowd that keeps the city alive under the British flag. The settings Mallick discovered at the turn of the century, the funicular, the botanical garden, the opium customs house, take on their full historical depth here, down to the twilight of Empire.
Bill Bryson, Nos voisins du dessous. Chroniques anglaises (1995)

An American settled in England for twenty years, Bill Bryson decides, before moving back to the United States, to tour his adopted country using only public transport. From Exeter to John o' Groats, by way of Yorkshire villages and Durham cathedral, he observes the quirks, the courtesy, the love of queues and the taste for compromise of the British, with a tender humor. Zaydan, in 1912, was already trying to grasp the English character, its morals, its education, its institutions. Eighty years later, another foreigner, more mocking but just as admiring, takes up the inquiry and finds that the essentials have not changed so much.

20th-Century Travel Narratives