An author is narrowly defined as the originator of any written work and can thus also be described as a writer (with any distinction primarily being an implication that an author is a writer of one or more major works, such as books or plays).

The genre of travel literature encompasses outdoor literature, guide books, nature writing, and travel memoirs.

One early travel memoirist in Western literature was Pausanias, a Greek geographer of the 2nd century AD. In the early modern period, James Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1786) helped shape travel memoir as a genre.