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Travel Books

Travel books have been a staple in Western literature for centuries, and as the area that a traveler can cover has increased, so has the tendency to write about all the sights, sounds, and peoples encountered. In the hands of a writer like Mark Twain or Paul Bowles, this genre can produce not only lively writing about foreign climes but also important philosophical observations on human life and the effect of travel on the individual. An examination of Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad and Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky will demonstrate how each has presented their journey, why they undertook this journey, and how this journey was both physical and philosophical for each.

The Innocents Aborad is a book that started as a series of letters written by Mark Twain for a newspaper in San Francisco concerning his 1867 trip on the Quaker City. The travelers on this ship were for the most part motivated by a desire to see the Holy Land. Twain's major purpose in making this trip was to see a part of the world he had not yet seen, and his purpose in writing this book was to reveal to others what he had seen with his own eyes, the reality of the world separated from the interferences of pretense and convention. He wanted the account to be both informative and entertaining. The book that resulted is a mixture of irreverence and the promotion of America as an ideal. One of the central themes in the work is the degree to which the reality differs from the expectations of the narrator. The narrator visits not only the Holy Land but most of Europe, and he reacts to such institutions as Paris, the Old Masters in Italy, and Roman Catholicism. Twain also poked fun at the hypocrisies of the religious pilgrims traveling with him and at such other elements common to travelers as guidebooks and hotel rooms.

The trip--called the great Pleasure Excursion to Europe and the Holy Land--was much advertised before Twain joined. Much of the trip is...

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Travel Books. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 11:01, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681148.html