A short life of the author
Paul Edward Theroux (b. 1941) was born on 10 April 1941 in Medford, Massachusetts, into a large French-Canadian family. He studied English at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Maine. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi and taught in Uganda, Singapore, and England before settling in Hawaii and Cape Cod.
Life and Career
His early novels — Waldo (1967), Fong and the Indians (1968), Girls at Play (1969) — drew on his African experiences. Saint Jack (1973) — about an American pimp in Singapore — was adapted by Peter Bogdanovich (1979).
The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) was his breakthrough — a book about a four-month train journey from London through Turkey, Iran, India, Southeast Asia, Japan, and the Trans-Siberian Railway back to Europe. It established the modern travel narrative: subjective, literary, and often cantankerous.
The Mosquito Coast (1981) — about an American inventor who moves his family to the Honduran jungle to build a utopia — is his finest novel: a brilliant, terrifying study of American idealism pushed to madness. Peter Weir adapted it as a film (1986) starring Harrison Ford.
His travel books form a body of work unmatched in scope: The Old Patagonian Express (1979, Latin America by train), Riding the Iron Rooster (1988, China by train), The Happy Isles of Oceania (1992, paddling through the Pacific), The Pillars of Hercules (1995, circumnavigating the Mediterranean), Dark Star Safari (2003, overland through Africa), Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008, retracing the Great Railway Bazaar), Deep South (2015), On the Plain of Snakes (2019, Mexico).
Major Works and Themes
Theroux writes about the act of travelling — not tourism but genuine displacement. His prose is precise, often cutting; his observations are sharp and frequently unflattering; his curiosity is inexhaustible.
Key Works
- The Great Railway Bazaar (1975)
- The Mosquito Coast (1981)
- Dark Star Safari (2003)
Collecting Theroux
Waldo (1967, Houghton Mifflin) — his debut — brings $100–$300.
The Great Railway Bazaar (1975, Houghton Mifflin) brings $50–$200. Theroux signs at events; signed copies are available.
Bibliography
| Title | Year | Publisher | Language |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dark Star Safari Theroux returns to Africa overland — from Cairo to Cape Town by every available bus, boat, and truck, revisiting the East African countries where he taught as a Peace Corps volunteer forty years earlier, confronting the devastation wrought by aid dependency and political corruption. | 2002 | Hamish Hamilton | English |
| Hotel Honolulu A blocked writer becomes the manager of a seedy Waikiki hotel and discovers that every guest and employee is a story — a novel-in-stories set in the underbelly of tourist Hawaii, dark, comic, and revealing about what people do when they think they're invisible. | 2001 | Hamish Hamilton | English |
| My Secret History A thinly disguised autobiography — Andre Parent grows from a Catholic boyhood in Massachusetts through Peace Corps Africa, a writing career in London, and serial infidelities, a novel about the double life every writer leads and the marriages destroyed by secrets. | 1989 | Hamish Hamilton | English |
| Riding the Iron Rooster A year-long journey across China by train in 1986 — from the Mongolian border to Tibet, from Shanghai to Kunming, Theroux traverses a country opening after decades of Maoist isolation, recording the contradictions of Deng Xiaoping's China with characteristic skepticism and precision. | 1988 | Hamish Hamilton | English |
| Saint Jack Jack Flowers is an aging American in 1960s Singapore who runs a brothel for visiting sailors and businessmen while dreaming of respectability — a picaresque novel about expatriate failure, colonial twilight, and the gap between what we do for money and who we believe ourselves to be. | 1973 | Bodley Head | English |
| The Great Railway Bazaar The book that invented modern literary travel writing — Theroux's four-month journey by train from London through Asia to Japan and back via the Trans-Siberian Railway, observing fellow passengers and foreign landscapes with a novelist's eye for character and a misanthrope's wit. | 1975 | Hamish Hamilton | English |
| The Happy Isles of Oceania Theroux paddles a collapsible kayak through the Pacific islands — from New Zealand to Australia to Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia — a journey undertaken during the breakdown of his marriage, the Pacific's vastness mirroring his own emotional desolation. | 1992 | Hamish Hamilton | English |
| The Lower River A retired teacher returns to the African village where he served as a Peace Corps volunteer forty years earlier, expecting grateful nostalgia — instead he finds a devastated community that traps him, strips him of possessions, and treats him as a resource to be exploited. | 2012 | Hamish Hamilton | English |
| The Mosquito Coast Theroux's finest novel — Allie Fox, a brilliant, paranoid inventor, drags his family to the Honduran jungle to build a utopia powered by his ice-making machine, a journey from American idealism into madness narrated by his thirteen-year-old son Charlie, adapted into a 1986 Harrison Ford film. | 1981 | Hamish Hamilton | English |
| The Old Patagonian Express A train journey from Boston to Patagonia — Theroux rides every rail connection from Massachusetts through Mexico, Central America, and down the spine of South America to the wind-blasted end of the line in Esquel, Argentina, a dark, funny meditation on travel as escape. | 1979 | Hamish Hamilton | English |