Neither a passionate pilgrim, a stalker of the picturesque, nor a satirist of the American fascination with an older world, John William De Forest in Oriental Acquaintance; Or, Letters from Syria (1856) and European Acquaintance; Being Sketches of People in Europe (1858) presents the details of everyday life he observes in his travels. His eyes were open to the significance of the ordinary and the seemingly trivial, and his ability in these two travel narratives to capture a scene, a moment, or a character foreshadows the strengths he evidenced in his later career as a novelist. Unburdened by the twentieth-century travel writer's awareness that even a "factual" world is to some degree an imaginary construct of the perceiver, De Forest gives us the "real" world of ordinary life as well as the occasional extraordinary adventure of the mid-nineteenth century traveler.

John William De Forest, the fifth and youngest son of...