Famous Travel Guide Books

As the winner of this year's Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year award is announced read Telegraph Travel's pick of the 20 most inspiring travel books of all time On the Road by Jack Kerouac This book should come with a health warning aimed particularly at those in their formative years: proceed with caution, you may never be able to settle in one place again. And you might take up hitch-hiking. On The Road features a series of trips made by Kerouac and his Beat Generation friends across America in the years after the Second World War. Through the eyes of narrator Sal Paradise (Kerouac himself) the reader is transported from New York to Denver to San Francisco and LA. Along the way there's jazz, poetry and drugs. And there's Dean Moriarty, whose incredible thirst for life (and women) gives the book its extraordinary momentum. "The only people in life for me are the mad ones... the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles, " says Sal of his explosive travelling companion. And with those words, a thousand trips were launched... • Find more recommendations in our guide to the best summer holiday reads
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This gallery was published in 2014 and was updated and republished on September 28, 2015