Thomas Gaskell Allen

After graduating from Washington University in St. Louis in 1890, he and fellow student William Lewis Sachtleben set off on a round-the-world bicycle journey that became the stuff of legend. Their travels took them from Constantinople across Persia, Central Asia, and China, and their account of that expedition was later published as Across Asia on a Bicycle.

The book helped make his name as a travel writer. It combines endurance, curiosity, and close observation, describing landscapes, border crossings, local customs, and the practical challenges of moving through vast regions by bicycle at a time when that was still a startling novelty.

Even now, he is remembered less as a conventional literary figure than as an adventurous firsthand narrator. For listeners who enjoy travel writing, exploration, and late-19th-century world journeys, his work offers both a gripping route across Asia and a window into how extraordinary such a trip once seemed.