Outdoor literature

Outdoor literature is a literature genre about or involving the outdoors. Outdoor literature encompasses several different sub-genres variously called Exploration literature, Adventure literature and Nature literature. These genres can include activities such as exploration, survival, sailing, mountaineering, whitewater boating, geocaching, kayaking, etc. or writing about nature and the environment. They all involve being in the outdoors as a central theme and are usually narrative non-fiction. It differs from Travel literature, although the two genres can mix and there is no definitive boundary.

Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854) is an early and influential work. Although not entirely an outdoor work (he lived in a cabin nearby civilization) he expressed the ideas of why people go out into the wilderness to camp, backpack and hike: to get away from the rush of modern society and simplify life. This was a new perspective for the time and thus Walden has had a lasting influence on most outdoor authors.

Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879), about his travels in Cévennes (France), is among the first popular books to present hiking and camping as recreational activities, and tells of commissioning one of the first sleeping bags.

The National Outdoor Book Award was formed in 1997 as a US-based non-profit program which each year honors the best in outdoor writing and publishing.

Notable outdoor literature

• Pre-19th Century
  • Richard Hakluyt (1589). Voyages. A foundation text of the travel literature genre.
• 19th Century
  • Charles Darwin (1839). The Voyage of the Beagle.
  • Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (1841). Two Years Before the Mast. Some of the earliest descriptions of California.
  • John MacGregor (1866). A Thousand Miles in a Rob Roy Canoe. Considered the first documentation of recreational canoeing.
  • Edward Whymper (1871). Scrambles Amongst the Alps in the Years 1860-1869
  • Mark Twain (1872). Roughing It. Part real part fiction, classic account of life in the American Old West.
  • Robert Louis Stevenson (1878). An Inland Voyage. A canoeing trip through France and Belgium in 1876
  • Joshua Slocum (1900). Sailing Alone Around the World. A 53-year old Nova Scotia mariner is first to do this between 1895 and 1898.
• 20th Century
  • Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World, an account of Robert Falcon Scott's 1910-1913 expedition to the South Pole.
  • Ernest Shackleton (1917), South. A classic of polar exploration.
  • Evelyn Waugh (1930s). When the Going Was Good. With Waugh around the Mediterranean, to Ethiopia, across Africa and through the jungles of South America, in the late 1920s and 1930s.
  • Grey Owl (1935). Pilgrims of the Wild. About Grey Owl's life in the wilds of Canada.
  • Gontran de Poncins (1939). Kabloona. French adventurer living with Eskimos in the late 1930s.
  • Wilfred Thesiger (1950s). Arabian Sands. Another classic of adventure. Since he travelled so much, Thesiger's biography, The Life of My Choice also rates as a great travel book. Thesiger's travels took him to Ethiopia, Arabia, French West Africa and the Sudan. He was an explorer/adventurer, soldier and British colonial official.
  • Maurice Herzog (1951). Annapurna: Conquest of the First 8000-metre Peak. Probably the most influential mountaineering expedition book.
  • Wallace Stegner (1954). Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West
  • Eric Newby (1958). A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. Popular English travel writer.
  • Theodore Taylor (1969). The Cay. Story of race and survival on an isolated cay.
  • Jon Krakauer (1990s). Into the Wild, Into Thin Air.

External links

• National Outdoor Book Awards
• Outdoor Book Review. A Guide to Outdoor Literature.
• National Geographic Adventure: 100 Best Adventure Books. Alternate site.
• Outside Magazine's 25 Best Adventure Books of the Last 100 Years
• Bookmarks Magazine 101 Crackerjack Sea Books, the best books about the sea.
• Adventure Literature; A Critique from The Open Critic
• American Journeys, collection of primary exploration accounts of the Americas.

See also

• Category:Non-fiction outdoors writers