Old Worlds, New Travels: Jack London’s People of the Abyss, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and the Cultural Politics of Travel

Although we may not immediately think of Jack London and Ernest Hemingway as travel writers, like many well-to-do Americans of their respective eras, they were travelling much more than their parents' generation had, and their writing is indelibly marked by these experiences away from home.London's forays, especially north to Alaska and the Yukon, but also to ports of call in the Pacific, were undertaken at the height of the American imperial era, and his writing sometimes echoes the discourses of empire.A generation younger than London, Hemingway's famous expatriate cosmopolitanism is marked by what Ford Maddox Ford dubbed the "habit of flux," the quintessentially modernist mode whereby the artist seeks the shock of exile to see one's own culture more clearly.1 In this essay, I argue that by reading London and Hemingway together as travel writers, we can elucidate the rapidly shifting cultural politics of travel and tourism, as well as their respective impacts on the way Americans would come to think of travel in the twentieth century and beyond.In many ways, London and Hemingway offer a study in contrasts.This is perhaps most obvious in their outward political stances, as London's avowed socialism could easily be juxtaposed to Hemingway's calculated apoliticism.Despite their obvious differences, however, when it comes to engaging with the cultural politics of travel of their respective eras, the two famous authors share much in common.Notably, I will suggest, both London and Hemingway