Short answers, pulled from the story.
Travel literature is a genre encompassing outdoor literature, guide books, nature writing, and travel memoirs. It includes poems, books, memoirs, biographies, novels, journals, and online blogs, and can be either factual, as in guidebooks, or fictional adventures influenced by personal experience.
Among the earliest examples are the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, generally dated to the 1st century CE, and Pausanias's Description of Greece from the 2nd century CE. Medieval examples include the travel journals of Ibn Jubayr (1145-1214), Marco Polo (1254-1354), and Ibn Battuta (1304-1377).
Slave travel narratives, which developed during the 18th and 19th centuries, documented how enslaved people escaped the restrictive laws of the southern United States and the Caribbean to find freedom. Notable examples include Frederick Douglass's autobiographical Narrative, Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave, and Harriet Ann Jacobs's Incidents.
The systematic study of travel literature emerged as a field of scholarly inquiry in the mid-1990s. It developed its own conferences, organizations, journals, monographs, anthologies, and encyclopedias. Key pre-1995 works include Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes (1992) and Paul Fussell's Abroad (1980).
The interwar period has been described as a heyday of travel literature. Established writers who traveled and produced notable books during this time include Graham Greene, Robert Byron, Rebecca West, Freya Stark, Peter Fleming, and Evelyn Waugh.
Petrarch's climb of Mont Ventoux in 1336 is considered one of the earliest known records of travelling for the sake of pleasure and writing about it. He stated he went to the mountaintop purely for the pleasure of seeing the top of the famous height, and he called the companions who stayed below frigida incuriositas, meaning a cold lack of curiosity.