ERNEST HEMINGWAY WAS PERHAPS the most peripatetic of the authors who shaped American literature. He traveled at home and abroad, on ship, train, car, and plane, spending a good bit of time not just on the travel itself but also on the myriad details that attend it: checking timetables, booking passage, obtaining visas, making reservations at hotels, arranging for letters of credit and money in various currencies, requesting and organizing payment for fishing permits, hunting licenses, and tickets for bullfights, making arrangements for the handling of personal mail, bills, and, even more important, manuscripts, publishing contracts, and page proofs that needed to be mailed back and forth within set deadlines. He also supervised details like the ordering and proper packing of the necessary hunting and fishing gear and, another important item in Hemingway’s travels, the boxes and trunks of books that always accompanied him.

Hemingway was interested in and careful about all these details, as we learn from his letters to his friends, in which he reports how busy he is with arrangements, comments on the equipment he is acquiring, updates them on his frequently modified itineraries, instructs them how best to write or cable him (usually through his bank or his editor, Max Perkins), and urges them to meet up with him somewhere. Traveling so often and so much, checking in and out of hotel rooms and rented apartments, hunting or fishing for months on end and, in addition, frequently derailed by marital and romantic complications, periodic bouts of depression, a series of serious accidents, and frequent fevers and infections — where did this man find the time and concentration needed for reading and writing? But somehow, in spite of or more probably because of the chaos and upheaval that characterized so much of his life, he read entire libraries on a variety of subjects and wrote poetry, a play, two volumes of journalism, five books of nonfiction, nine novels, and about fifty short stories, many of them masterpieces.

Travel is of course a complex process: one leaves one place or condition in order to reach another, but what is one seeking?