Robert Byron

Robert Byron (1905-1941) was a British travel writer, best known for his travelogue The Road to Oxiana.

Byron was born in 1905, and educated at Eton and Merton College, Oxford. He died in 1941, during the Second World War, when the ship he was serving on was torpedoed by a U-Boat off Cape Wrath.

Byron's The Road to Oxiana is considered by many modern travel writers to be the first example of great travel writing. It is an account of Byron's ten-month journey to Persia and Afghanistan in 1933-34.

Writer Paul Fussell wrote in his 1982 book Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between The Wars that The Road to Oxiana is to the travel book what "Ulysses is to the novel between the wars, and what The Waste Land is to poetry." Travel writer Bruce Chatwin has described the book as "a sacred text, beyond criticism," and carried his copy "spineless and floodstained" on four journeys through central Asia.

However, in his day, Byron's travel books were outsold by those of writers Peter Fleming and Evelyn Waugh.

Bibliography

• The Station (1928) - visiting the Greek monasteries of Mount Athos
• The Byzantine Achievement (1929)
• The Appreciation of Architecture (1932)
• First Russia, Then Tibet (1933)
• The Road to Oxiana (1937) - visiting Persia and Afghanistan

Reference

• Fussell, P. (1982) Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (ISBN 0195030680)
• Robert Byron: A biography (2003) James Knox