ABSTRACT
The pious pilgrims to the Holy Land and the genteel literary travelers to Palestine both share presuppositions about the seriousness with which the Holy Land should be treated. These presuppositions are rejected by a third group of travelers: the skeptical travelers who wrote entertaining accounts of their journeys to the Holy Land that emphasize the farcical or quotidian elements in their pilgrimages. J. Ross Browne advertises his text as unconventional, but he actually follows numerous conventions of travel writing about the Holy Land quite closely even as he occasionally amplifies or redirects these conventions. The four most notable travelers in this category are the well-known novelist John William Deforest, the soldier and adventure writer J. Ross Browne, and the African-American travel writer and slave David Dorr, and, of course, Mark Twain. Franklin Walker has identified J. Ross Browne, along with Herman Melville and Mark Twain, as an "irreverent pilgrim" to the Holy Land.
