Mary Morris

How do you know if you’re a traveler? What are the telltale signs? According to Mary Morris, it is your obsession with maps. Or at least it is hers. Since she traveled to the American West as a child or as a teenager when her mother carted her off to Europe, she has been obsessed with them. Years later when her mother would find her with an Atlas spread out on the bed, she’d say, “Oh, no. She’s traveling again.” For decades Morris often traveled solo, keeping careful journals and writing about her adventures. Whether wandering through Central America by bus as she did in her travel classic "Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone" or searching for tigers in India by Jeep, which she wrote about in her more recent "All the Way to the Tigers," it is her maps – both inner and outer – that have guided her.