Henry Vollam Morton - Travel Writing

Travel Writing

Morton's first book, The Heart of London, appeared in 1925, and was a development of his popular Daily Express columns. In 1926, as motoring was becoming established in the UK, he set off to drive around England in a bull-nosed Morris, an early mass-produced motor-car. His account of these travels and of the England of the 1920s was published in 1927 as In Search of England, a best-seller that established him as one of the leading travel-writers of the age. A number of similar books dealing with different regions of the UK followed.

Even greater acclaim greeted Morton's first foreign travel book, In the Steps of the Master (1934), which sold over half a million copies. The Master was Jesus, and the book an account of Morton's travels in the Holy Land. This was soon followed by In the Steps of St. Paul (1936), which presents a picture of Ataturk's Turkey.

This was followed by Through Lands of the Bible (1938) in which he visits Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Iraq, and gives a marvellous picture of this now vanished scene. Extracts from all three books were combined and published as Middle East during World War II for the servicemen stationed there.

After the war, Morton turned his attention to South Africa, publishing In Search of South Africa in 1948. In the late 1950s and early 1960s he wrote a number of books dealing with Spain and Italy. A Traveller in Italy deals with North Italy.

A biography, by Michael Bartholomew, based on Morton's private papers, titled In Search of H.V.Morton was published by Methuen in 2004.