A prolific and innovative travel writer, Jan Morris has, paradoxically, always rejected the label of travel writer. Known for incorporating local history and lore, literary and personal anecdotes, and geographical description into her travel narratives, Morris approaches her writing comprehensively, defying conventional genre distinctions. This defiance of labeling has extended to her personal life; although born a man, she realized at an early age that she was in fact a woman and eventually underwent a sex change operation. In her major works, Morris successfully combines a cultural map of inhabitants with a keen and compelling sense of their physical environment to form a clear conception of locale, sympathetically depicting the cultures and people that she encounters during her travels.

Jan Morris was born James Humphrey Morris on 2 October 1926 in Clevedon, Somerset, England to Walter and Enid Payne Morris. The nine-year-old James Morris began a lifelong love affair with...