Old Glory is a travel book by Jonathan Raban. It is the winner of The Royal Society of Literature’s Heinemann Award and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.
Old Glory describes Raban’s voyage down the Mississippi River in a 16-foot aluminium “Mirrocraft” powered by a 15 h.p. Johnson outboard engine. Inspired by his reading of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a seven-year-old boy living in Norfolk, in which his local stream is transformed into the Mississippi Valley in his imagination, Raban sets out on his own personal journey thirty years later.
It is in this book that the author develops his own unique writing style (starting to emerge in Arabia Through the Looking Glass), with highly descriptive scenes of the landscape that he passes through, as well as ironic but highly incisive descriptions of the characters he meets along the way. This style is more fully developed in his later travelogues: Coasting (book), Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America and Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings.
