Sedentary (writing about a place by an outsider who settles there):

1) "South from Granada," by Gerald Brenan. Young Englishman leaves home, settles in a small Andalusian village, and writes a book that takes travel writing out of its dilettante sphere and creates with it a kind of novelistic anthropology.

2) "The Last Time I Saw Paris," by Elliot Paul. This forgotten classic by an American journalist chronicles in fascinating detail the life of a small street in Paris' Latin Quarter that is a microcosm of France before the Second World War.

3) "Hunting Mister Heartbreak," by Jonathan Raban. Settling briefly in places as diverse as Manhattan, Key West, Alabama and Seattle, Raban gets to the heart and humor of America.

4) "Old Calabria," by Norman Douglas. Not a resident, but he traveled so thoroughly and knowledgeably through this southernmost region of Italy that the book resounds with authority and critical admiration.

5) "Out of Africa," by Isak Dinesen. From the first sentence - "I had a farm in Africa" -- we are drawn into another place and time.

6) "Bitter Lemons," by Lawrence Durrell. A warm and anguished tale of the tragedy of Cyprus by one of the modern Mediterranean's most eloquent rhapsodists.

7) "Beyond Euphrates," by Freya Stark. A travel autobiography by the woman who was to the Arab world what Durrell was to the Mediterranean.

8) "Down and Out in Paris and London," by George Orwell. Two gleaming capitals seen from the seedy side by a brilliant and unsentimental observer.

9) "Liebling Abroad," by A.J. Liebling. A collection by the great New Yorker writer who adopted France as his spiritual (and gustatory) home. Even with the war correspondence, you feel as if you're in the company of a jovially eccentric uncle who wears his considerable learning lightly.

10) "Two Towns in Provence," by M.F.K. Fisher. All the flavors and nuances of the region before it became synonymous with the good life.

Itinerant (writing about a place by an outsider who is just passing through):

1) "A Time of Gifts," by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Young Englishman (again) sets off on a walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople and absorbs and assimilates everything in his path: customs, wildlife, architecture, languages. ("Between the Woods and the Water" is the second volume of this unfinished trilogy.)

2) "The Road to Oxiana," by Robert Byron. The critic Paul Fussell compared this account of a journey through the Middle East with Joyce's "Ulysses" and Eliot's "The Waste Land."

3) "A Dragon Apparent," by Norman Lewis. An exhaustive tour through Indochina by one of travel writing's greatest and least recognized practitioners.

4) "In Patagonia," by Bruce Chatwin. A quirky, elliptical work that showed the artistic heights that travel writing can ascend to.

5) "An Area of Darkness," by V.S. Naipaul. A study of India by the man who brought a moral intensity to the genre.

6) "Behind the Wall," by Colin Thubron. Thubron combines a keen intellect - he learned Mandarin before this trip to China - with an emotional depth that allows him not only to interpret but to connect.

7) "When the Going Was Good," by Evelyn Waugh. A collection of some of the funniest travel accounts ever written.

8) "Old Glory," by Jonathan Raban. Sailing down the Mississippi, Raban is as perceptive a traveler as he is subtle.

9) "Journey Without Maps," by Graham Greene. This account of a trek in West Africa incorporates memories of childhood and possesses a darkness that foreshadows Naipaul.

10) "The Great Railway Bazaar," by Paul Theroux. The rollicking train trip through Europe and Asia that demonstrated, once again, that it's not the sights, it's the people.
salon.com | May 19, 1999

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