Outdoor Literature - Notable Outdoor Literature

Notable Outdoor Literature

• Pre-19th Century
  • Richard Hakluyt (1589). Voyages. A foundation text of the travel literature genre.
• 19th Century
  • Charles Darwin (1839). The Voyage of the Beagle.
  • Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (1841). Two Years Before the Mast. Some of the earliest descriptions of California.
  • John MacGregor (1866). A Thousand Miles in a Rob Roy Canoe. Considered the first documentation of recreational canoeing.
  • Edward Whymper (1871). Scrambles Amongst the Alps in the Years 1860-1869
  • Mark Twain (1872). Roughing It. Part real part fiction, classic account of life in the American Old West.
  • Robert Louis Stevenson (1878). An Inland Voyage. A canoeing trip through France and Belgium in 1876; Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879).
  • Joshua Slocum (1900). Sailing Alone Around the World. A 53-year old Nova Scotia mariner is first to do this between 1895 and 1898.
• 20th Century
  • Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World, an account of Robert Falcon Scott's 1910-1913 expedition to the South Pole.
  • Ernest Shackleton (1917), South: the story of Shackleton's last expedition, 1914-1917. A classic of polar exploration.
  • Evelyn Waugh (1930s). When the Going Was Good. With Waugh around the Mediterranean, to Ethiopia, across Africa and through the jungles of South America, in the late 1920s and 1930s.
  • Grey Owl (1935). Pilgrims of the Wild. About Grey Owl's life in the wilds of Canada.
  • Gontran de Poncins (1939). Kabloona. French adventurer living with Eskimos in the late 1930s.
  • Wilfred Thesiger (1950s). Arabian Sands. Another classic of adventure. Since he travelled so much, Thesiger's biography, The Life of My Choice also rates as a great travel book. Thesiger's travels took him to Ethiopia, Arabia, French West Africa and the Sudan. He was an explorer/adventurer, soldier and British colonial official.
  • Maurice Herzog (1951). Annapurna: Conquest of the First 8000-metre Peak. Probably the most influential mountaineering expedition book.
  • Wallace Stegner (1954). Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West
  • Eric Newby (1958). A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. Popular English travel writer.
  • Alfred Lansing (1959). Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage.
  • John Hillaby, Journey to the Jade Sea (1964); Journey through Britain; Journey through Europe; Journey to the Gods (1991). Accounts of various long distance walks.
  • Theodore Taylor (1969). The Cay. Story of race and survival on an isolated cay.
  • Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts (1977); Between Wind and Water. The two volumes describe a walk across Europe.
  • Jon Krakauer (1990s). Into the Wild, Into Thin Air.
  • Joe Simpson, Touching the Void (1988). Mountain climbing in the Andes
  • Jim Perrin, Spirits of Place (1997); The Climbing Essays (2006); West: A Journey through the Landscapes of Loss (2010). A rock climber and travel writer.
  • Rory Stewart, The Places in Between (2006). A walk across Afghanistan in 2002, after the Russians had left.
  • Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination; The Wild Places; The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012). He is one of a number of recent British writers who have provoked a new critical and popular interest in writing about landscape.