Jonathan Raban changed travel writing forever

Jonathan Raban was largely responsible for changing the nature of travel writing. Back in the 1970s when he began, the genre still viewed the world from under the tilt of a Panama hat (‘I looked at the tops of the columns. Were they Doric or Ionic?’). It was considered ill bred for a writer to reveal anything about themselves; they were supposed to be a transparent pane of glass through which one could view the world.

Raban tore this up, and with glee. He had worked closely with American confessional poets like Robert Lowell and John Berryman, producing one of the best essays on Lowell’s late poems about his messy divorce.  He had even been Lowell’s lodger for a while. Now he took the same transatlantic approach to travel writing and elicited the same chorus of disapproval the poets had experienced for being so personal. Yet it was patently as absurd for a writer not to tell the reader if he was going through emotional turmoil as it would be for a traveller not to tell a companion on that same journey.