All about best-selling author – Bill Bryson

21st March 2020

William McGuire Bryson was born on December 8^th, 1951 in the Midwest backwoods of Des Moines, Iowa. He escaped to spend most of his adult life in England, and to become a prolific, popular and highly successful author of humorous travelogues and books offering accessible insights into science, history, language, Shakespeare and the body.

Bill’s early life in Des Moines was with his parents Bill Senior and Agnes, both journalists on the Des Moines Register, brother Michael and sister Mary. His humorous 2006 memoir – The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid – was about this early life in Iowa.

After dropping out of Drake University in 1972, Bill backpacked around Europe, initially on his own and later with friend Matt Angerer, his quirky observations and experiences resulting in Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe, published in 1992.

Bill’s first visit to England was in 1973, and he decided to stay after finding a job working in a psychiatric hospital. He met a nurse, Cynthia Billen, here and they married in 1975. After a brief return to Des Moines for Bill to finish his degree, they settled back in England as Bill worked in journalism, initially on the Bournemouth Evening Echo and then for The Times and The Independent. 

A renowned Anglophile, Bill and his family have lived in Surrey, Dorset, North Yorkshire, Norfolk and are now based in rural Hampshire. He has been President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England and the Chancellor of Durham University, he was awarded the OBE in 2006, and has won numerous prizes for his literary and scientific achievements.

But his success and renown were achieved by the extraordinary popularity of his travelogues. (1989), Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe (1992), Notes from a Small Island (1996), A Walk in the Woods (1998), Notes from a Big Country (1999), Down Under (2000), and African Diary (2002) all contained Bill’s astute observations about a place’s people, culture and strange customs, told with his trademark wry humour and intelligence. TV and big screen adaptations brought his work to the attention of a wider audience, although the 2015 film of A Walk in the Woods, starring Robert Redford and Nick Nolte should probably have stayed on the cutting room floor.

As the travel adventures finally waned, Bill’s other wide-ranging interests resulted in books about science (A Short History of Nearly Everything; The Body: A Guide for Occupants), history, language and biography (Shakespeare: The World as Stage).

We have many of Bill’s books on the TripFiction database here, and here is a blog post we wrote about Bill in our #AuthorsOnLocation series about travel writers.

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