Sinners and Saints: A Tour Across the States and Round Them, with Three Months Among the Mormons

In 1892, a Victorian gentleman boards a train in New York and begins a journey that will carry him across a America in transformation. Phil Robinson brings exactly the kind of sharp, amused eye you want in a travel writer: curious about oddities, attentive to the texture of daily life, and perfectly willing to mock the pretensions he encounters. His account of crossing the continent by rail captures a nation still thrumming with possibility, where frontier towns rise from prairie grass and the strange, hermetic society of the Mormons waits in Utah like a secret. Robinson spends three months among them, observing their customs, their prophet, their defiant isolation with a blend of skepticism and genuine fascination. The result is neither a reverent portrait nor a sensational expose, but something more valuable: a educated traveler's candid reckoning with a civilization most Americans only heard rumors about. His humor is dry, his observations are specific, and his America is one that has vanished entirely.