The Walker's Literary Companion

Going out for a long walk, the nineteenth-century novelist and essayist Robert Louis Stevenson would bring with him the classic English walking essay, William Hazlitt's "On Going a Journey" (1821), about which he claimed, passionately if dogmatically, it is "so good that there should be a tax levied on all who have not read it." Imagine being so taken with an essay on walking! But history, at least of a past two hundred years, reveals that walkers have loved to read about their passion; and-given the perennial market for magazine essays and fictions, poems, and novels either describing a walk or set on a walk-that non-walking readers also like to imagine life occurring on the path or pavement.

The three editors have in common a love of walking and love of the literature of walking. We are all university scholars who have written books on literature and walking, and through this last connection have come to know one another. The mutually infectious nature of the subject and our dedication to it led to the present volume. To this end we have walked the streets of Manhattan and around the Central Park Reservoir, huddled in a Chicago hotel room, and tramped the bluffs on the Northern California coast, culling from memory our favorite walking pieces from the great collective wellspring of human writing.

We have composed our anthology for both pedestrian and non-pedestrian readers. Is there a person alive, except for the physically disabled, who is not a walker? Everyone walks, but we address those who "love" walking, either on the ground or in the imagination. When about 100 years ago he compiled "The Lore of the Wanderer: An Open-Air Anthology," a small plain blue-covered book one could put in a back pocket, George Goodchild-in perhaps the first of a substantial cluster of such collections-caught the spirit of our end-of-this-century volume: a book (a companion) to be taken with you; or, if you cannot get out for a walk, you can read one at home.

There are, however, important differences between Goodchild's collection and ours. By "Open-Air" he meant the air of the country-side far from the polluting enclosures of the city. By insisting upon walking as a rural pleasure, Goodchild bl