Bruce Chatwin

Bruce Chatwin was a British author whose In Patagonia and The Songlines combined travel writing, anthropology, fiction, and personal mythology into a form entirely his own and among the most influential in late twentieth-century nonfiction.

Bruce Chatwin worked as an expert at Sotheby’s auction house, wrote journalism, studied archaeology, and then published In Patagonia (1977) at thirty-seven — a book that immediately established itself as something new. It is nominally a travel book about Patagonia, but it is really about wandering, myth, exile, and the stories that collect around remote places and the people drawn to them. Its structure is collage rather than narrative: vignettes, historical fragments, portraits of characters encountered, all circling around a piece of skin from a brontosaurus (actually a mylodon) that Chatwin remembered from his grandmother’s house.

The Songlines (1987), about Aboriginal Australian walking tracks and the relationship between music, landscape, and human identity, is his most ambitious book and the one that most explicitly states his central obsession: the idea that the nomadic life is the natural human state, and that settled civilization is a deviation that creates most of our psychological pathologies. The argument is provocative and probably wrong in its strongest form, but it is compelling reading.

In Patagonia, Utz (a novella about a porcelain collector in Prague), The Viceroy of Ouidah, and On the Black Hill constitute a small but extraordinary body of work. Chatwin died of AIDS in 1989 at forty-eight. His work has influenced generations of travel writers and creative nonfiction authors, though his accuracy has been questioned — he blended fact and fiction in ways that were not always transparent.