American Travel Writers, 1850-1915 edited by Donald Ross and James Schramer. Dictionary of Literary Biography, No. 189. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman; Gale, 1998.

The introduction continues the history of American travel and travel writing into the second half of the 19th century and into the early 20th century from our previous volume. A key factor was the decreased time and cost of going abroad. Perhaps more important was the maturity of the tourist industry, which staked serious claims on many of the sites which were more remote in earlier years. To a significant degree, the new traveller developed an ethnic shell, and managed to see distant landscapes as being inhabited only by wildlife, or tried to find ways to domesticate the exotic. At the end of the century, the overlapping of travel writing and American imperialism became more obvious than it had previously been. (pp. xv-xx.)

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

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