SOURCE: Holland, Patrick, and Graham Huggan. “Introduction: Travel Writing Today.” In Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing, pp. 1-26. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Holland and Huggan discuss the continued popularity of travel writing in the twentieth century, focusing on a definition of contemporary travel writing and its components.

“I do not expect to see many travel books in the near future,” wrote Evelyn Waugh at the end of the Second World War: “Never again … shall we land on foreign soil with letter of credit and passport … and feel the world wide open to us” (When the Going Was Good 11). But Waugh, as it turned out, was seriously underestimating the resilience of travelers, and of the worldwide network—the business—that continues to support their enterprise. Travel and its literary by-product, the travel book, have a habit of justifying their...