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A Brief Look at the British Travel Memoir

Published on : 19 February, 201527 February, 2015 Published by : Lauren Alwan

Three authors linked by the British tradition of going by foot and writing about it. A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople, by Patrick Leigh Fermor. A classic of the travel memoir genre, A Time of Gifts is Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of his trek by foot from the Netherlands to Turkey in 1933-34—though [….]

On this day, April 3, in 1783, Washington Irving was born in New York City. Best known for his stories, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, he was also an accomplished biographer, with works on Christopher Columbus, Muhammad and George Washington (after whom he was named, due to his being born the same week that NYC inhabitants learned of the ceasefire that signaled the end of the Revolutionary War) to his credit. Not only a writer, he also went on a surveying mission deep in Indian Territory, spent time as the U.S. Ambassador to Spain, and gave advice to a young Edgar Allen Poe. He died of a heart attack at his estate in Tarrytown, New York in 1859, at age 76.

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