Adam of the Road follows eleven-year-old Adam Quartermayne through a year of wandering in the England of Edward I, beginning in June 1294. Adam is boarding at the abbey school of St. Albans, learning his letters with his friend Perkin, a ploughman's son who longs to study at Oxford, while his red spaniel Nick lodges with an old woman, Dame Malkin, because dogs are not allowed at school.
Theme
Travel Journey
81 works in the library take up travel journey, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Address to the Nation on the Challenger Disaster.
Works
On the morning of 28 January 1986 the space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after lifting off from Cape Canaveral, killing all seven of its crew. Among them was Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire high school teacher chosen as the first Teacher in Space, and because of her, millions of schoolchildren were watching in their classrooms.
Huckleberry Finn tells his own story in the speech of a half-schooled Missouri boy, some forty or fifty years before the book appeared. After the treasure found at the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the Widow Douglas has taken Huck in to civilize him, while her sister Miss Watson drills him in manners and spelling.
Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, in George Makepeace Towle’s public-domain English translation, follows Phileas Fogg’s Reform Club wager to circle the globe in eighty days with his servant Passepartout, while detective Fix shadows him as a bank-robbery suspect. Steamships, railways, elephants, and storms turn geography into a race; calm precision meets loyal improvisation.
Because I could not stop for Death is Emily Dickinson's most famous poem about dying, written in Amherst around 1862-1863, the years of her greatest productivity and of the Civil War. It was not printed until 1890, four years after her death, when Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson included it in the first collection of her Poems under the title The Chariot.
Candide, ou l'Optimisme follows a guileless young man raised in the castle of the Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh in Westphalia, where the tutor Pangloss teaches that this is the best of all possible worlds and that everything is for the best. Candide is kicked out of the castle for kissing the Baron's daughter Cunégonde behind a screen, and the rest of the tale tests Pangloss's doctrine against an avalanche of catastrophe.
Carry On, Mr. Bowditch is a fictionalized biography of Nathaniel Bowditch (1773–1838), the self-taught Salem mathematician whose New American Practical Navigator became the standard American guide to navigation at sea. It opens in Salem, Massachusetts, during the Revolutionary War, when Nat is a small boy in a seafaring family led by his father, Captain Habakkuk Bowditch.
Villehardouin's chronicle is the eyewitness account of the Fourth Crusade by one of its leaders. It opens in 1198-99 with the preaching of Fulk of Neuilly and the indulgence proclaimed by Pope Innocent III, and with a tournament at Écry in Champagne where Count Thibaut of Champagne and Count Louis of Blois take the cross, soon joined by Count Baldwin of Flanders.
Daisy Miller: A Study is told in close third person through Frederick Winterbourne, a young American who has lived most of his life in Geneva and has grown, in his aunt's phrase, too used to European ways. At a hotel in Vevey on Lake Geneva he meets Annie 'Daisy' Miller, a pretty, rich and uninhibited girl from Schenectady, New York, travelling with her vague, dyspeptic mother and her brash little brother Randolph, accompanied by a courier, Eugenio, whom they treat almost as a member of the family.
Death Comes for the Archbishop follows Jean Marie Latour and Joseph Vaillant, French missionary priests sent to the newly annexed American Southwest to organize the Catholic Church in New Mexico. Cather shapes the novel less as a conventional plot than as a sequence of remembered journeys, encounters, hardships, and acts of pastoral administration.
Death in Venice follows the last weeks of Gustav von Aschenbach, a celebrated German writer in his fifties, ennobled on his fiftieth birthday, whose prose epic on Frederick the Great and other works have made him a model of disciplined art. Thomas Mann published the novella in 1912, and it is told in five chapters by a narrator who comments on Aschenbach with a mixture of sympathy and irony.
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha was published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. An impoverished hidalgo of about fifty, Alonso Quixano, reads chivalric romances until, from too little sleep and too much reading, his brain dries up and he loses his wits.
Gargantua and Pantagruel is the collective title of five comic books about a dynasty of giants, written by François Rabelais and published between 1532 and 1564. Pantagruel appeared first, at Lyon in 1532, under the anagram pen-name Alcofribas Nasier; Gargantua, about the father, followed in 1534 or 1535 and is now printed as Book I. The Third Book (1546) and the Fourth Book (complete 1552) bore Rabelais's own name, and a Fifth Book was published in 1564, eleven years after his death; how much of it he wrote is disputed.
Grasshopper on the Road is an easy-reader book of six short linked stories about a grasshopper who decides one morning to follow a road wherever it leads, and about the creatures he meets on the way, each of whom has made one idea the whole of life. In "The Club," a crowd of beetles welcomes him to their We Love Morning club and chants the praises of dew and sunrise, until Grasshopper admits that he also likes afternoon and night; they throw him out, and he walks on.
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver, presents itself as the sober memoir of a ship's surgeon. In Part I, shipwrecked, Gulliver wakes on the shore of Lilliput tied down by people six inches tall.
On a cold December morning in Holland, fifteen-year-old Hans Brinker and his twelve-year-old sister Gretel skate on the canal near the village of Broek on wooden runners Hans has carved himself. Their family is very poor.
Heart of Darkness is told by an unnamed narrator aboard the yawl Nellie, anchored in the Thames estuary at dusk, who reports a story told by his companion, the seaman Charles Marlow. Marlow begins by observing that the Thames, too, was once one of the dark places of the earth when the Romans came.
In Patagonia is an account of Chatwin's journey through the southern tip of South America in the mid-1970s, told in 97 short, numbered chapters that mix travel, history, legend and portraits of people met along the way. The book begins in childhood: in his grandmother's cabinet in England lay a piece of skin with coarse reddish hair, which he was told came from a 'brontosaurus' and had been sent by his grandmother's cousin, Charley Milward, a sailor who settled in Patagonia.
Journey of the Magi is a dramatic monologue in which one of the wise men of Matthew 2, now old, remembers the journey to Bethlehem and asks what it meant. T. S. Eliot wrote it in 1927, the year he was baptized and confirmed in the Church of England, and Faber and Gwyer published it that August as the eighth of its Ariel Poems, small illustrated pamphlets sold as Christmas cards, with a drawing by E. McKnight Kauffer.
Journey to the West is the great Ming-dynasty comic and religious novel about the monk Xuanzang's pilgrimage from Tang China to India to bring back Buddhist scriptures, guarded by a band of supernatural disciples. The library text is not a full translation.
Kidnapped is narrated by David Balfour, a seventeen-year-old Lowland Scot who in June 1751, after his father's death, leaves the village of Essendean with a letter for the House of Shaws. The minister Mr. Campbell sends him off with a shilling, a Bible and a handwritten recipe for lily-of-the-valley water, and with the news that he is a Balfour of Shaws.
Lassie Come-Home is the story of a tricolour collie who crosses hundreds of miles of Scottish and English country to return to the boy she loves. In the Yorkshire mining village of Greenall Bridge, Lassie belongs to Sam Carraclough, and every man in the village agrees she is the finest collie he has ever seen.
Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain's book about the great river in two eras: the steamboat age of his youth and the changed river he revisited in 1882. It opens with three chapters of history and lore, from De Soto and La Salle to the keelboat and raft men, including a long raft episode with the boy Huck Finn borrowed from the novel Twain was then writing.
Little House on the Prairie follows the Ingalls family through roughly a year in Kansas, on land the book calls Indian Territory, around 1869 and 1870. Pa sells the little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin because the woods are filling with people and the game is growing scarce.
Mr. Popper's Penguins is a comic novel in twenty short chapters about a house painter in the small town of Stillwater who dreams of the polar regions. Mr. Popper is a gentle, rather untidy man with a patient wife and two children, Bill and Janie.
My Father's Dragon is told by a narrator about the boyhood adventure of their father, Elmer Elevator. One cold rainy day Elmer brings home a drippy old alley cat; his mother hates cats, whips him when she finds the saucer in the cellar, and throws the cat out.
De Magnete, magneticisque corporibus, et de magno magnete tellure (On the Magnet, Magnetick Bodies Also, and on the Great Magnet the Earth) was published in London in 1600 by William Gilbert, a Colchester-born physician who became president of the College of Physicians that year. It is the first large book devoted to experimental study of magnetism and one of the earliest works of natural philosophy built on systematic, repeated experiment.
On the Road is narrated by Sal Paradise, a young writer living with his aunt in New Jersey, and records a series of journeys back and forth across the United States and into Mexico between 1947 and 1950. The engine of the book is Dean Moriarty, a fast-talking, car-stealing, endlessly restless young man from Denver who seems to Sal the embodiment of a wild, joyous American energy.
Persian Letters is an epistolary novel made up of letters exchanged between two Persian noblemen travelling in Europe, Usbek and his younger companion Rica, and their friends, servants and wives back home in Isfahan. The letters run from 1711 to 1720, covering the last years of Louis XIV, the Regency and the collapse of John Law's financial system.
Psalm 23 is a six-verse song of trust, headed in the Hebrew Psalter as a psalm of David and placed in the first book of Psalms, between the anguished cry of Psalm 22 and the processional hymn of Psalm 24. Its speaker never asks for anything.
Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) follows a restless young Englishman who ignores his father’s counsel, goes to sea, and after storms and slavery is cast alone on an island where industry, improvisation, and providence remake his life. The novel invented a lasting modern myth of solitude: journal-keeping, goat pens, canoe failures, fear of footprints, and the arrival of Friday.
Siddhartha is a short, lyrical novel set in India in the time of the Buddha, following the spiritual journey of a young man who seeks enlightenment through experience rather than doctrine. Siddhartha is the handsome, gifted son of a Brahmin, admired by all and loved by his friend Govinda.
St. Thomas Becket and the Canterbury Miracles traces a murder into a medical archive. Becket's political story is familiar: the brilliant royal chancellor becomes archbishop of Canterbury, clashes with Henry II over ecclesiastical liberty and royal jurisdiction, goes into exile, returns under tense compromise, and is killed in the cathedral on 29 December 1170 by knights acting in the atmosphere of the king's fury.
Stuart Little is the second son of Mr. and Mrs. Frederick C. Little of New York City, and from his arrival he is only about two inches tall and looks in every way like a mouse. The family, including his older brother George, treat him as one of themselves, and Stuart is courteous, neatly dressed in tiny clothes, and full of enterprise.
Tanglewood Tales is Nathaniel Hawthorne's second book of Greek myths retold for children, a sequel to A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys. In a short introduction called The Wayside, Hawthorne pretends that the stories were written by his young friend Eustace Bright, a Williams College student who had told the first set to a group of children at Tanglewood in the Berkshires; Eustace visits Hawthorne's snowy Concord hillside with six new stories, and Hawthorne agrees to act as editor.
The Arabian Nights Entertainments is Andrew Lang's 1898 selection of the Thousand and One Nights for children, retold in English from Antoine Galland's early eighteenth-century French version. The frame story comes first.
The Argonautica is the one full Greek epic of the voyage of the Argo that survives from antiquity, composed in four books of dactylic hexameter by the Alexandrian scholar-poet Apollonius of Rhodes in the third century BC. King Pelias of Iolcus, warned by an oracle to beware a man wearing one sandal, sees Jason arrive having lost a sandal in the river Anaurus, and sends him to fetch the golden fleece from Colchis at the far end of the Black Sea.
The Call of the Wild follows Buck, a huge St. Bernard and Scotch shepherd cross, through one terrible and transforming year of the Klondike gold rush. Buck lives as the lord of Judge Miller's estate in the Santa Clara Valley of California until Manuel, a gardener's helper who needs money for his lottery gambling, sells him to dog traders.
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories framed by a pilgrimage. One April, the narrator, who calls himself Chaucer, is lodging at the Tabard Inn in Southwark when a company of some twenty-nine pilgrims arrives on its way to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury.
The Divine Comedy begins with Dante lost in a dark wood midway through life, unable to climb the sunlit hill because beasts block his way. Virgil comes as guide and leads him through Inferno, where punishments reveal the inner logic of disordered love, violence, fraud, and treachery.
Around AD 117 the Ninth Legion, the Hispana, marched north from Eboracum into Caledonia to put down a rising of the tribes and was never seen again; its bronze eagle standard was lost with it. Some years later Marcus Flavius Aquila, whose father commanded the legion's First Cohort and vanished with it, arrives as a young centurion to command a cohort of auxiliaries at the frontier fort of Isca Dumnoniorum in the far southwest of Britain.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is the great poem of ancient Mesopotamia, known in its fullest form from the standard Babylonian version on clay tablets, many of them from the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. The library holds no text of it: the public-domain English versions, by Stephen Langdon (1917), Morris Jastrow and Albert T. Clay (1920) and R. Campbell Thompson (1928), are fragmentary scholarly editions of a poem still being recovered, so this record describes the epic without quoting it.
Book I of The Faerie Queene, the Legend of the Knight of the Red Cross, or of Holiness, tells how a young, untried knight wins his spurs by freeing a kingdom from a dragon and, on the way, learns how easily a Christian soul is deceived. Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, has sent the Redcrosse Knight, who bears a bloody cross on breast and shield, to help the lady Una, whose royal parents are besieged in their brazen castle by a monstrous dragon.
The Golden Ass is a comic, erotic, violent and religious novel about curiosity transformed into degradation and salvation. Lucius, a young man fascinated by magic, travels in Thessaly, a region famous for witches.
The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles is Padraic Colum's retelling for young readers of the voyage of the Argo, with many other Greek myths woven into it as stories told by the heroes on the way. It was published in New York by Macmillan in 1921, with illustrations by Willy Pogány, and was named a Newbery Honor book in 1922.
The Heroes; or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children is Charles Kingsley's retelling of three Greek hero legends, Perseus, the Argonauts and Theseus, written for his children Rose, Maurice and Mary. The preface is signed from Farley Court in Advent 1855, and the book was published by Macmillan in 1856.
The Histories is the first great work of prose history in the Western tradition, an inquiry (historia) into the causes and course of the wars between the Greeks and the Persian Empire. Herodotus states his purpose in the opening: to preserve the memory of great and marvellous deeds of Greeks and barbarians, and especially the reason why they fought one another.
Tom Jones tells the story of a foundling raised by a good country gentleman, his expulsion from home, his adventures on the road and in London, and his final restoration and marriage. The eighteen books are each opened by an essay in which the narrator talks with the reader about the art of writing, critics, love, or human nature.
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again tells how Bilbo Baggins, a comfortable, respectable hobbit of Bag-End under the Hill, is drawn into an adventure he never wanted. The wizard Gandalf marks his door, and thirteen dwarves led by Thorin Oakenshield arrive for an unexpected party.
The Horse and His Boy takes place during the golden age of Narnia, while the four Pevensie children reign at Cair Paravel, and it happens mostly in Calormen, the hot, crowded empire far to the south. Shasta, a boy of about eleven, lives in a fishing village with Arsheesh, a hard man who works him like a servant.
The Journal of John Woolman is the spiritual autobiography of a New Jersey Quaker tailor and minister, begun in his thirty-sixth year and continued until a few days before his death. He opens in Northampton, Burlington County, where as a child he reads the twenty-second chapter of Revelation by the roadside and, soon after, kills a mother robin with a stone and then her nestlings, an act whose horror teaches him that God has placed in every mind a principle of goodness toward all creatures.
The Journey of the Mind into God is Bonaventure's compact map of contemplative ascent, written after meditation on Francis of Assisi's vision of the six-winged seraph at La Verna. The work is structured around six stages, corresponding to the seraph's wings, by which the mind rises through creation, the self, and the names of God before passing beyond conceptual mastery into ecstatic union.
The Little Prince is told by a pilot who, as a boy of six, drew a boa constrictor digesting an elephant; every grown-up who saw Drawing Number One took it for a hat, and he gave up art for flying. Years later his engine fails in the Sahara, a thousand miles from anyone, with water for about a week.
The Lord of the Rings continues the story begun in The Hobbit. Sixty years after his adventure, Bilbo Baggins leaves the Shire on his eleventy-first birthday and, at Gandalf's urging, leaves his magic ring to his young cousin and heir Frodo.
The Mayflower Compact is a single paragraph of about two hundred words, signed on 11 November 1620 (Old Style; 21 November by the modern calendar) aboard the ship Mayflower as it lay at anchor in the hook of Cape Cod, in what is now Provincetown Harbor. The ship had left Plymouth, England, in September with about a hundred passengers.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket begins as a sea adventure told by a young Nantucketer whose craving for forbidden experience repeatedly overrides judgment. Pym and his friend Augustus Barnard first make a disastrous drunken voyage in the Ariel, a small boat nearly destroyed before rescue.
Mary Rowlandson's narrative tells of the eleven weeks and five days she spent as a captive during King Philip's War, the conflict of 1675-1676 between the New England colonies and an alliance of Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuc and other Native peoples led in part by the Wampanoag sachem Metacom, whom the English called King Philip. It opens on 10 February 1675, by the Old Style calendar then used in English New England (20 February 1676 in modern reckoning), when a large war party attacks Lancaster, Massachusetts.
The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus's long return from Troy to Ithaca and of the household that must survive his absence. The poem opens not with Odysseus but with disorder: his son Telemachus is growing up under the pressure of suitors who consume the estate and demand that Penelope choose a new husband.
The Persian Expedition, known in Greek as the Anabasis or 'march up-country', is Xenophon's account of the campaign of 401–399 BCE in which about ten thousand Greek mercenaries followed Cyrus the Younger into Mesopotamia and then fought their way home. Cyrus, younger son of Darius II, gathers an army in Sardis on the pretext of a war against Pisidian raiders, while his real aim is to unseat his brother, King Artaxerxes II.
The Phantom Tollbooth is a comic fantasy about Milo, a boy so bored that nothing seems worth doing, learning, or even noticing. One afternoon he finds a large package in his room containing a toy tollbooth, a map of unfamiliar lands, coins and a rule book.
John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) is the dream-allegory of Christian fleeing the City of Destruction with a burden on his back, seeking the Celestial City through Slough, Wicket Gate, Hill Difficulty, Vanity Fair, and Doubting Castle. Written by a tinker-preacher in prison, it became the English-speaking world’s most widely read religious narrative after Scripture.
The Road Not Taken is a twenty-line lyric in four five-line stanzas, first printed in The Atlantic Monthly in August 1915 and placed by Frost, in italics, at the head of his third book, Mountain Interval (1916). It is among the most quoted American poems and among the most often misread.
The Silver Chair begins behind the gym at Experiment House, a muddled modern boarding school where bullies rule. Jill Pole is crying there when Eustace Scrubb, much changed since his voyage on the Dawn Treader, tells her about Narnia.
The Sketch Book is a miscellany of essays, travel sketches and tales presented as the notebook of Geoffrey Crayon, a genial American bachelor who crosses the Atlantic to look at the England he has known from books. Crayon opens by explaining that he wanders to see the shifting scenes of life, then describes the voyage itself, a visit to the Liverpool historian William Roscoe, and a portrait of a wife who sustains her ruined husband.
Richard Hannay, a thirty-seven-year-old Scottish-born mining engineer who has made his money in Rhodesia, has come home to London in the spring of 1914 and finds himself bored almost to despair. One May evening a neighbor from the top floor of his building, an American named Franklin P. Scudder, begs to be taken in.
The Travels of Ibn Battuta is the account of a Moroccan legal scholar who left Tangier in June 1325, aged twenty-one, to make the pilgrimage to Mecca and did not settle at home again until 1349. Its Arabic title, given by its editor Ibn Juzayy, means A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling; it is usually called simply the Rihla, the Journey.
The book, known in Italy as Il Milione and in early French manuscripts as the Devisement du Monde (Description of the World), is less a diary than a geography of Asia as the Polos knew it, organized by route and region and told in the voice of Rustichello, who often addresses the reader directly. The Prologue tells how the Venetian brothers Niccolò and Maffeo Polo, trading in the Crimea and on the Volga in the 1260s, were carried by war farther and farther east until envoys brought them to Kublai, the Great Kaan of the Tartars, who questioned them about the Pope and the Christian faith and sent them back to Rome asking for a hundred learned Christians and oil from the lamp of the Holy Sepulchre.
The True Story of My Life is the autobiographical sketch Hans Christian Andersen wrote in 1846, at forty-one, for a collected edition of his works. He opens by calling his life a lovely story, happy and full of incident, and says it shows that a loving God directs all things for the best.
The Voyage of the Beagle is Darwin's account of his five-year journey around South America, the Pacific, Australia, and the Atlantic aboard HMS Beagle. It is a travel book before it is an evolutionary treatise: Darwin describes landscapes, fossils, earthquakes, volcanoes, coral reefs, animals, plants, Indigenous peoples, imperial violence, slavery, disease, and the practical hardships of field observation.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the third Chronicle of Narnia to be published. Edmund and Lucy Pevensie are spending the summer holidays with their aunt and uncle in Cambridge, where their cousin Eustace Clarence Scrubb, a priggish, bullying boy raised on modern notions, makes them miserable.
The Wind in the Willows (1908) follows Mole’s break into the sunlight, Rat’s river manners, Badger’s solid hospitality, and Toad’s reckless motorcar mania among the English riverbank and Wild Wood. Kenneth Grahame writes animal characters who keep human foibles without losing the feel of water, willow, and snow.
Dorothy lives on the grey Kansas prairie with her Uncle Henry, her Aunt Em and her little black dog Toto. When a cyclone strikes, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry reach the cellar, but Dorothy runs back for Toto, and the house is carried away with the two of them inside.
Through Gates of Splendor is Elisabeth Elliot's account of five young American missionaries who were killed in January 1956 while trying to make friendly contact with the Waorani, an isolated people of the Ecuadorian rainforest then known to outsiders as the Aucas. Elliot, the widow of one of the men, tells the story largely through the men's own letters, diaries and the recollections of their wives.
Through the Looking-Glass is the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. On a snowy afternoon, the day before a bonfire she hopes to see, Alice sits by the fire scolding her black kitten, wonders what the room behind the drawing-room mirror is like, climbs onto the mantelpiece and passes through the glass.
Travels with My Aunt begins with retired bank manager Henry Pulling attending his mother's funeral. There he meets his formidable Aunt Augusta, who disrupts his suburban routine and suggests that his family history is less settled than he believed.
Treasure Island is narrated mainly by Jim Hawkins, the son of an innkeeper whose ordinary life is transformed when the old pirate Billy Bones comes to the Admiral Benbow inn. Bones brings a sea chest, a map and danger in the form of former shipmates, including Black Dog and the blind beggar Pew.
In 1866 ships in several oceans report a huge, swift, glowing creature, and some are holed by it. Pierre Aronnax, a professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris who happens to be in New York, publishes the opinion that it is a gigantic narwhal and is invited to join the American frigate Abraham Lincoln, under Commander Farragut, which sails to hunt it.
Ulysses is a seventy-line dramatic monologue in blank verse that Tennyson wrote in October 1833, within weeks of learning that his closest friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, had died suddenly in Vienna. He published it in his two-volume Poems of 1842.
Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco in 1873 to Chinese parents who lived there as merchants and were subjects of the Emperor of China. His parents returned to China in 1890.
Watership Down is the epic of a small band of rabbits who leave their home to found a new one. In the Sandleford warren in Berkshire, a small, nervous rabbit named Fiver, who has visions, sees the field covered in blood and begs his brother Hazel to warn the Chief Rabbit, the Threarah, who dismisses them.
Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands is the lively autobiography of a Jamaican doctress, nurse and businesswoman. Mary Seacole begins in Kingston, where she was born to a Scottish soldier and a Creole mother who kept a boarding house and was famous for her cures; she declines to give the year, saying only that she and the century were young together.