Waverley Root’s 1958 Passport | Passport-Collector
The Passport That Followed a Food Writer From Paris to a War Zone
A passport that identifies its owner as “Writer,” signed off by a US embassy counselor rather than the usual clerk, isn’t something I come across often. That’s exactly the case with the 1958 American passport of Waverley L. Root, the journalist who spent his career filing dispatches from Paris and, almost as a side project, changed how English-speaking readers understood French food.
A Newsman From Fall River Who Found His Subject in Paris
Waverley Lewis Root was born on April 15, 1903, in Providence, Rhode Island, and grew up in Fall River, Massachusetts, in circumstances that gave no real hint of the career ahead of him. (Some published sources, including the original version of this article, list April 5 rather than April 15. Biographical records I checked consistently point to the 15th, so I’ve corrected it here.) After Tufts College, he landed in Greenwich Village during its interwar heyday as a magnet for writers and artists, and it was a planned short trip to Paris in 1927 that quietly rewrote his plans. He stayed, taking a post with the European edition of the Chicago Tribune.
Root went on to spend more than three decades reporting from Paris, eventually becoming that city’s correspondent for The Washington Post and later a columnist for the International Herald Tribune. He covered the political convulsions of twentieth-century Europe firsthand, and that vantage point, watching history unfold in the same city where he ate his meals, is what eventually spilled over into his food writing.
Between Deadlines and Dinner Tables: How The Food of France Redefined Food Writing
The Food of France, published in 1958, has never gone out of print, and that alone says something about the book Root wrote. It moved region by region through French cuisine, treating recipes as inseparable from the geography, history, and temperament of the people who cooked them. Root followed it with Food: An Authoritative and Visual History and Dictionary of the Foods of the World in 1980, cementing a body of work that fused a reporter’s precision with genuine appetite, in every sense of the word.
Why an Embassy Counselor Signed a Writer’s Passport
The passport in front of me was issued by the US embassy in Paris on October 22, 1958, and what stands out immediately is the countersignature: it carries the signature of the embassy’s counselor rather than a routine consular officer, an unusual detail for a standard passport issuance. Root’s occupation is listed simply as “Writer.” The document was renewed once in 1961, valid through 1962, and its pages carry entry and exit stamps from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Switzerland, a fair sketch of a working correspondent’s actual travel pattern in that period.
Alongside the American passport sits a separate French document from 1958 authorizing Root’s travel to Algiers, this time listing his occupation as “Journalist.” That second document is the more interesting one historically, and it’s worth pulling apart on its own.
Crossing Into Algeria at the Edge of a War
That French travel authorization exists because Algeria, in 1958, was still administered as French territory, which meant a trip from Paris to Algiers was treated in principle as domestic movement rather than international travel. In practice, though, 1958 fell squarely inside the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), and the practical reality on the ground looked nothing like a routine domestic trip. Checkpoints, heightened security, and restrictions on movement were common, particularly for anyone who wasn’t military personnel or a long-term resident, and a French national arriving without documentation risked real friction at the frontier. Root’s authorization was, in effect, a hedge against exactly that friction, prepared in a year when international press coverage of the war was intensifying and French authorities were increasingly conscious of how movement and access were being monitored. I’ve written before about how French colonial travel documents from Algeria functioned in an earlier period, and the contrast is instructive: a French Colonialism, Travel Order & Passport From 1852 shows a much more settled, bureaucratic relationship between Paris and Algiers than the one Root’s 1958 papers reflect, a relationship strained nearly to breaking by the time he made this trip.
The Long Lineage of the “First Food Guru”
Root is often credited as one of the earliest modern food gurus, but the title of first belongs to someone writing more than a century before him. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a French lawyer and politician, published Physiologie du goût (The Physiology of Taste) in 1825, and it’s one of the earliest books to treat eating as a subject worthy of serious philosophical and cultural discussion rather than mere sustenance. His famous line, that you can tell what someone is by what they eat, still gets quoted for good reason. Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reynière got there even earlier in one sense, publishing what’s considered the world’s first food reviews in L’Almanach des Gourmands between 1803 and 1812.
Root didn’t invent food writing as a serious genre. He inherited a tradition that Brillat-Savarin and Grimod de La Reynière had already established in France, and he extended it for an English-language audience with a reporter’s eye for detail and a correspondent’s understanding of how food, politics, and place are never really separate stories.
A Correspondent’s Final Chapter
Root died on October 31, 1982, at his home in Paris at the age of 79; his Washington Post obituary attributes the cause to pulmonary edema. He had retired from daily journalism in 1969 after roughly fifty years of filing from Europe, closing out a career that ran from Chicago Tribune wire copy to some of the most enduring food writing of the twentieth century. He’s survived, according to the site’s earlier reporting, by his wife Colette and a daughter, Diane Lane, from his third marriage; I haven’t been able to independently verify that detail through biographical sources, so I’d treat it as unconfirmed until I can pin it down further.
Root wasn’t a chef, and he never claimed to be one. What he did was treat food as a legitimate lens for understanding a country, the same way he’d spent thirty years treating politics that way, and that habit of mind is really what his passport, stamped across four countries, ends up documenting.
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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