This critical and cultural overview of American landscape and travel literature draws on sources from the 17th through 19th centuries, and includes diaries and journals, travelogues, guide-books, essays, lectures and poems. The material includes writings on the Puritan response, pre-colonial eighteenth century accounts, the immediate post-colonial period, expeditions, surveys, the picturesque and the sublime, wilderness literature, the West, the South, New England, Transcendentalism, California, the Hudson River School, Luminism, the Rocky Mountains and Plains. Also includes maps.

Brings together a wide range of material exploring the American landscape. Beginning in the 17th century, it moves on to the 18th and 19th centuries with a series of different kinds of landscape and travel literature as the map of response to the continent develops.