In December 1933 Patrick Leigh Fermor set out to walk from Rotterdam to Constantinople, a journey across many of the parts of Europe which would soon be devastated by fascism and war. After distinguished military service in Crete, Fermor made his career as a travel writer, finally narrating his account of that epic pre-war walk in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Waters. His compendious learning and literary style link Fermor to the 1930s tradition of Robert Byron and Peter Fleming discussed in the previous chapter. But A Time of Gifts was not published until 1977, coinciding with a raft of books by younger writers - notably Paul Theroux, Peter Matthiessen, Bruce Chatwin, and Robyn Davidson - which in different ways announced a decisive shift in modern travel writing and which will provide the pivot for this chapter's survey.

Post-war voices

Fermor’s first travel book, written after an extensive post-war tour of the West Indies, was The Traveller’s Tree (1950). Winner of the Heinemann Foundation Prize for Literature, The Traveller’s Tree signalled – in the continuity of its voice with pre-war writers – that a bridge had been successfully thrown over the turbulent decade of the 1940s, and that English gentlemen were still able to travel the world and to write with witty nonchalance about what they encountered. Wilfred Thesiger, Eric Newby, and Norman Lewis are other members of Fermor’s generation whose work spans the entire second half of the twentieth century and has proved enduringly popular.