Is Travel Writing Dead?

Not quite.

Between cellphones, Google Earth, and jumbo jets, it seems there's nowhere in the world left to explore, but Malcolm Jones says, for the Daily Beast, that new books by Paul Theroux and John Gimlette prove that travel books still have something to tell us.

From the story...

This raises the unsettling question, is the grand era of travel writing dead? If it is, it had a good, long life, beginning with Sir Walter Raleigh's glowing prospectus for the New World and then thriving for the better part of four centuries. The men and women who defined the form—the Burtons, Von Humboldts, and Meads—were explorers, pioneers, and scientists bent on discovery. That any of them could write was just our good luck. And if the tradition is dead or in decline, it will not be because there are no longer such people but because their subject matter is literally running out. Google Maps is not the problem but merely a symptom of how overrun the world has become (Read Paul Theroux's take on our shrinking planet). You can still risk your life retracing Henry Morton Stanley's exploration of the Congo River, but only Stanley could do it first and then break the story.

Until well into the last century, the adventurers and naturalists who went out and came back with fabulous stories—the Wallaces, Starks, Apsley-Gerrards, and Matthiessens—were explorers almost in the same sense that Marco Polo was an explorer. Until then, there were plenty of places and people yet to be found and written about. People read travel books almost like news stories, for the fresh information they revealed about exotic climes and customs. After all, until the advent of the car and the airplane, most people simply did not get out much or go very far when they traveled—the travel book predates the travel guidebook by several centuries. But in an age where you can book a trip almost anywhere, from Angkor Wat to Antarctica, when China alone is in the process of building some 250 new airports, the world shrinks by the day, and so does the possible itinerary of the travel writer itching to go off the map.