Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens — known to the world as Mark Twain — arrived at travel writing through journalism. In 1867 he joined a steamship excursion to Europe and the Holy Land, filing dispatches for the San Francisco Daily Alta California that became The Innocents Abroad (1869), his first major book and one of the best-selling American travel books of the 19th century.

What Twain brought to travel writing was a democratic irreverence that the genre had never seen before. Where his predecessors approached the Old World with reverence, Twain approached it with a raised eyebrow. He found the "masters" of European art overrated, the ruins insufficiently ruined, and the local guides exhaustingly earnest. His persona — the honest American baffled by European pretension — was both a comic performance and a genuine cultural argument.

Roughing It (1872) applied the same sensibility to the American West, documenting his journey across the continent with the same mixture of tall tale, observation, and self-deprecating humour. A Tramp Abroad (1880) returned to Europe, this time on foot through Germany and Switzerland.

Twain's travel books are funny in ways that haven't dated — the jokes are against human vanity and cultural self-importance generally, not just against 19th-century targets.