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The Most Successful Trail Memoir
Cheryl Strayed’s landmark memoir Wild, subtitled “From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail,” published in March 2012, is one of the few trail memoirs to break out to a general audience and the only one by a woman. In May of that year Oprah Winfrey made it the first selection in her re-launched
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The Funniest Trail Memoir
A Walk in the Woods. Bill Bryson was better known as the witty and urbane author of popular science books like The Body and A Short History of Nearly Everything before he reached a mid-life professional crisis and dropped it all for a spell to hike the Appalachian Trail. One last adventure before it was
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The First Modern Trail Memoir
When Colin Fletcher set out to walk the length of California in March of 1958, he started two outdoor trends that are now commonplace: long-distance backpacking, and trail memoir. At the time Fletcher had a spotty resume for normal life, and the perfect one for a long thru-hike. He had been a captain in the
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Precursor to All Trail Memoir: John Muir
Though it doesn’t precisely fit our definition of trail memoir, because it doesn’t recount the hike of a well-defined footpath, there is little doubt that John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra is a forerunner to all books in the genre. Muir’s experience of living in the woods and mountains, and his state of
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The Trail Memoir Genre
Trail memoir is a subset of adventure travel memoir. Walking and reflecting are its essence. For our purposes here, trail memoir is the recounting of a long hike, on an easily identifiable route, often in wilderness, told in first person by the one that walked it. I’m going to resist for now including other self-powered
Trail Memoir 