Literary Career

Jane wrote eight books and hundreds of magazine articles, but what do we really know about her literary career? The best way to describe her work might be to call it travel and adventure writing, with an accent on the exotic and little known, especially from the standpoint of average Americans. She and her husband visited little-traveled places around the world, and she wrote about the personal impressions these places made on her.

In that sense, Jane is part of a small but noteworthy tradition of American female travel writers who made their names by living in exotic parts of the world and writing about their experiences (e.g., Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa [1928], Carolyn Mytinger’s Headhunting in the Solomon Islands [1937], Osa Johnson’s I Married Adventure [1940]). This early twentieth-century movement introduced the strong female traveler to America and the world.

When Jane Dolinger began her career in the mid-1950s she also fed into the vagabond movement in modern American literature, the same movement as her more famous contemporary, Jack Kerouac (On the Road, The Dharma Bums). Jane’s choice of personal narrative in travel nonfiction places her squarely in this genre. Typical of this movement, Jane’s travel writing is egocentric and impressionistic—it's not so much about the places as about Jane in those places, living and adapting to some of the strangest circumstances imaginable.

But if Jane’s work is self-centered, Jane herself was neither arrogant nor close-minded. She emerged at a time when writers in related fields were changing the way Americans viewed their place in the world. When Lederer and Burdick’s The Ugly American appeared in 1958, for example, Jane was releasing her third book showing how the sensitive and intelligent American abroad should really behave. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) came out when Jane had her fifth book on the market emphasizing her love for the unsullied jungle environment and her compassion for its native peoples. Other consciousness-raising studies of the wild (e.g., Joy Adamson’s Born Free [1960]) owe at least some small debt to the movement to which Jane Dolinger had already made contributions.

Jane is also a rare example of a travel writer who straddled the very different worlds of mainstream travel books and men’s periodical adventure writing. She wrote directly in the tradition of the great adventure magazines Argosy and True, and contributed to dozens of such magazines herself.

An important, though little studied, movement in twentieth-century travel writing began in the 1940s with Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer’s popular urban expose series (New York Confidential, Chicago Confidential, Washington Confidential). This new genre focused on the vice and sexuality of travel destinations in both the US and other countries. Jane borrowed from this seamy view of travel writing and ultimately helped refocus it toward the authentic exoticism of other cultures. By writing uncompromisingly about the strange cultural practices and sexual mores of little-known peoples, she shocked, titillated, but ultimately broadened the horizons of her readership.

Equally important, Jane experimented with a kind of writing that blurs the distinction between nonfiction and fiction. In much of her work, the locales and native customs are carefully observed while the plot elements are embellished for dramatic effect. Her natural flair for high drama in her writing, spurred on by her readership's taste for thrills, led her to create novelistic nonfiction that stretched the literal truth to capture the real impressions she felt. By the time that Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson and others were formulating the new nonfiction novel, Jane had already written the popular prototype.

In addition, Jane herself became a media figure that tapped into pop culture movements. The jungle adventurer, predominantly a male figure in the popular media, did have a few important female examples, and “Jungle Jane” made a sensation as a real-life version of characters such as Sheena, Queen of the Jungle (a popular comic book heroine created in the 1940s and subject of a TV series in the 1955-56 seasons) and the explosion of imitators at that time. Jane exploited this pop culture identification in her periodical writing, becoming known as America’s foremost traveling glamour girl. In this capacity she had no peer during the 1960s.

If Jane’s writing has a unique characteristic—a quality that identifies her place among travel and adventure writers—it’s that she made traveling seem wildly fun and sexy, an adventure from beginning to end in which the people of the world are inherently exotic, interesting, and worth knowing. Dangers, while real, are not insurmountable, and meeting them head-on just adds to the excitement. Reading a book by Jane Dolinger is like being on a thrill ride through a strange but seductive new land.