Famous Travel Writers

French · 1802–1870

The author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was also a prolific travel writer, documenting journeys through Spain, Italy, Russia, the Caucasus, and North Africa with the same theatrical exuberance that powered his fiction.

Welsh-American · 1841–1904

The journalist who found Livingstone and then crossed Africa from coast to coast, Stanley was the most celebrated explorer of the late Victorian age — his books were read as adventure stories even as they documented some of the darkest episodes of colonial history.

British · 1831–1904

The first woman elected to the Royal Geographical Society, Isabella Bird travelled alone to Hawaii, the Rocky Mountains, Japan, Korea, China, and Persia at a time when women rarely left the drawing room unescorted.

Scottish-American · 1838–1914

The father of American wilderness writing and the founder of the Sierra Club, Muir's accounts of the Yosemite Valley, Alaska, and the California mountains created the emotional vocabulary for conservation that still shapes environmental writing today.

American · 1835–1910

America's greatest humorist turned the grand European tour on its head in The Innocents Abroad, puncturing Old World pomposity with Missouri common sense and creating a distinctly American tradition of travel writing.

British · 1862–1900

Mary Kingsley travelled alone through West Africa in the 1890s, climbing Mount Cameroon and trading with Fang people who had never seen a European woman — and wrote about it with a dry wit that made her one of the bestselling travel writers of her age.

British · 1821–1890

Explorer, linguist, and controversialist, Richard Burton spoke 29 languages, disguised himself as a Muslim pilgrim to enter Mecca, co-discovered the source of the Nile, and wrote prolifically about journeys that broke every rule of Victorian respectability.

Scottish · 1850–1894

Best known for Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Stevenson was also a committed travel writer who hiked through the Cévennes with a donkey, sailed the Pacific on a yacht, and settled in Samoa, where he is buried.

British-Indian · 1865–1936

Born in Bombay and formed by India, Kipling wrote about travel and empire with an authority no other British writer of his generation could match — though his politics make him a complicated figure for modern readers.