Recommendations
Books Like Travels with My Aunt
Best books to read after Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene
Travels with My Aunt is Greene at his most playful — Henry Pulling's liberation from convention by Aunt Augusta, organized as a picaresque comedy of the conventional man and the unconventional guide. If the novel's warmth and its portrait of a man discovering that life has been waiting for him all along moved you, these books share its comic picaresque structure, its interest in the liberating figure who pulls the ordinary person out of their routine, and its conviction that the most interesting people are those who have refused to follow the rules.
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Our Man in Havana
by Graham Greene
The essential companion in Greene's comedies — Wormold's comic spy adventure in pre-revolutionary Cuba; the range of Greene's comedy from the political satire of Our Man in Havana to the picaresque holiday of Travels with My Aunt shows the full territory of his lighter fiction
- 2Buy
Lucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis
Amis's comedy about Jim Dixon's escape from academic convention — the essential parallel in the British comic tradition of the passive ordinary man liberated by contact with a more vital world; the comparison with Henry Pulling's liberation by Aunt Augusta shows the range of the type
- 3Buy
Tom Jones
by Henry Fielding
Fielding's picaresque novel — the foundational British picaresque and the essential predecessor to Travels with My Aunt's comic journey through the underworld of European crime and eccentricity; the comparison shows what Greene inherits from the eighteenth-century picaresque tradition
- 4Buy
A Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
Toole's Pulitzer Prize-winning comic novel about Ignatius J. Reilly's adventures in New Orleans — the most celebrated comic novel in the American tradition of the eccentric outsider; the comparison between Ignatius and Aunt Augusta as figures of comic unconventionality shows the range of the type
- 5Buy
Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
Heller's satirical war novel — the essential American parallel in the tradition of the comic novel about an ordinary man in a world of institutional absurdity; the comparison with Travels with My Aunt shows how the same formal interest in the conventional man liberated by chaos looks in a wartime American context
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain
Twain's picaresque novel about Huck's journey down the Mississippi — the essential American predecessor in the tradition of the road novel as a vehicle for moral education; where Henry Pulling is liberated by Aunt Augusta's cheerful amorality, Huck is liberated by Jim's humanity
- 7Buy
Ariel
by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Warner's comic novel about the eccentric inhabitants of a small English village who set up a commune — the most charming parallel to Travels with My Aunt in the tradition of British comic fiction about people who refuse to follow the rules; the comparison shows the range of the comic vision in mid-century British fiction
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The Old Man and Me
by Elaine Dundy
Dundy's comic novel about a young American woman in London who becomes obsessed with a charming older man — the essential companion in the tradition of the comic novel about an ordinary person's liberation by contact with a more vital figure; the comparison with Travels with My Aunt shows the range of the type across gender and nationality
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