June may be the most popular month in which to get married, but it also seems to be the most popular month in which to be born - at least for travel writers.
Earlier this month I noted the shared birthday - June 14 - of perhaps the two greatest living travel writers: Colin Thubron and Jonathan Raban.
Last Thursday marked the 106th anniversary of the birth of George Orwell, known primarily for his novels and essays. But like many British writers of his time - Waugh, Huxley, Greene - he spread his wings. In works like Burmese Days, Down and Out in Paris and London, and Homage to Catalonia, he brought politics to the travel memoir.
Friday would have been the 95th birthday of Laurie Lee, who wrote one of the most beautifully titled travel books: As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.
And Sunday would have been the 101st birthday of Norman Lewis, who died in 2003. He is one of the few modern travel writers who produced what are now generally considered classics: notably Naples 44 (a vivid portrait of the Italian city in the aftermath of WWII) and A Dragon Apparent (an alternately studious and droll account of his journey through Indochina in the late 40s).
And while I'm at it, it's worth mentioning the birthday, today, of the Polish poet and essayist Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004). Milosz wrote in The Separate Notebooks: "Every minute the spectacle of the world astonishes me; it is so comic that I cannot understand how literature could expect to cope with it."
