American Travel Writers, 1776-1864 edited by James Schramer and Donald Ross. Dictionary of Literary Biography, No. 183. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman; Gale, 1997.

The introduction outlines the motivation of American travellers between the War for Independence and the Civil War as a context for writing about that travel. Travel accounts in the 19th century follow a kind of progression - discoverers, explorers, romaniticzers, and exotic adventurers - while scientists, business people, and students of foreign cultures appeared throughout the era. The genre of travel writing varies between the biographical and autobiographical, and writers' adopt a variety of personae and attitudes toward their readers, with metonymy as its central trope (my experience is or should be universal). The whole enterprise is difficult to classify; libraries often shelve travel books with memoir, natural history, ethnography, and the border with fiction is often difficult to chart, especially owing to the important influence travel writing had on the novel (and vice versa). (pp. xv-xxvi.)

This volume has biographies of the forty famous writers whose destinations were within the United States territories or overseas, and it is limited to non-fictional accounts.

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