Coast to Coast

Fresh from her successful scoop reporting the first ascent of Everest in 1953, Jan Morris spent a year journeying across the United States, by car, train, ship and aeroplane. In herwords a 'period piece', Coast to Coast describes an American identity markedly different from today. In her brilliant prose, Morris records with exuberence and curiosity a time of innocence in the US - when television was in its infancy, the Big Mac had not been invented and the popular song of the day was 'Chattanooga Choo-Choo'.

Jan Morris was born in 1926 of a Welsh father and an English mother. She spent the last years of her life with her partner Elizabeth Morris in the top left-hand corner of Wales, between the mountains and the sea. Her books include Coronation Everest, Venice, the Pax Britannica trilogy and Conundrum. She was also the author of six books about cities and countries, two autobiographical books, several volumes of collected travel essays and the unclassifiable Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. She was recognized in 2018 for her outstanding contribution to travel writing by the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards. In the same year, In My Mind's Eye: A Thought Diary was published. It was followed by a second volume of diaries, Thinking Again, in 2020, and then her posthumously published final book, Allegorizings, in 2021.