Fourteen books of letters, journals and travel notes
Books written as they happened, or close to it: letters from Egypt, an eighteenth-century tour in epistolary form, a printer's autobiography, and travel journals that were never meant to be read as literature and are all the better for it.
The list
- The Expedition of Humphry Clinker — Tobias Smollett, 1771. An epistolary road novel that is rude, energetic and unexpectedly modern about class.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Letters from Egypt — Lucie Duff Gordon, 1865. Letters that turn a health trip into one of the most sympathetic travel books of the century.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin — Benjamin Franklin, 1791. The founding text of American self-improvement, written by a man who knew exactly what he was doing.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Apologia Pro Vita Sua — John Henry Newman, 1864. Victorian autobiography at its most lucid, written under pressure and without self-pity.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Aran Islands — John Millington Synge, 1907. A travel memoir that doubles as a writer's notebook, and the source of Synge's stage language.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - A Thousand Miles up the Nile — Amelia Edwards, 1877. The best Victorian account of the Nile, written by a woman who turned tourism into scholarship.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Innocents Abroad — Mark Twain, 1869. The funniest travel book of the nineteenth century, and a useful antidote to reverence.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - A Little Tour in France — Henry James, 1884. The best kind of literary travel writing: opinionated, unhurried and full of buildings.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Bible in Spain — George Borrow, 1843. A swaggering, unreliable travel classic about selling books in a country that did not want them.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Alhambra — Washington Irving, 1832. A romantic sketchbook that created the Alhambra as an image in the English-speaking world.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Far Away and Long Ago — W. H. Hudson, 1918. One of the best childhood memoirs in English, and a portrait of a vanished landscape.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Walden — Henry David Thoreau, 1854. Part account book, part experiment in attention, still argued with 170 years later.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Souls of Black Folk — W. E. B. Du Bois, 1903. The founding book of modern American sociology, and one of the most beautiful essay collections ever written.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The City of Dreadful Night and Other Places — Rudyard Kipling, 1891. Early Kipling on the machinery of a colonial city, sharper and less sentimental than his later work.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon
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