Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux (born April 10, 1941, Medford, Massachusetts, U.S.) is an American novelist and travel writer known for his highly personal observations on many locales. With bestsellers that include the nonfiction travelogue The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) and the adventure novel The Mosquito Coast (1982), he is credited with creating a new brand of travel literature that remained influential in the 21st century.

Education, Peace Corps experience, and early novels

One of seven children, Theroux took refuge from the lack of privacy in his childhood home by immersing himself in books, libraries, long solo hikes, and various menial jobs. After graduating from the University of Massachusetts in 1963, he chose to join the Peace Corps rather than continue on to medical school, as he had originally planned. In an interview with The Guardian in 2022, Theroux explained that the social and political tumult of the 1950s and ’60s partly inspired his decision: “One of the reasons I joined the Peace Corps and went to Africa was because America was unbearable. It was on fire.” His Peace Corps experience proved to be life-changing. In a 2009 essay for Condé Nast Traveler, Theroux reminisced:

I was well aware, with a lightness of soul, that I was unburdened. Everything I owned in the world fitted into the small suitcase I had with me. I had nothing in the bank, no property; did not own so much as a chair. I was superbly portable. I had just turned twenty-two.

Until 1971 he taught English in Malawi, Uganda (where he met and married his first wife, Anne Castle), and Singapore. Thereafter, he and Anne lived in England with their two sons. Theroux devoted all his time to writing, initially finding some success with fiction. His early novels—including Girls at Play (1969), Jungle Lovers (1971), and Saint Jack (1973; film 1979)—center on the social and cultural dislocation of Westerners in postcolonial Africa and Southeast Asia.

Friendship with V.S. Naipaul

In 1972 he published a critical analysis of the writing of literary giant V.S. Naipaul, whom Theroux had met in Uganda and who had become his mentor. Though the book was laudatory of Naipaul’s work, Naipaul himself was indifferent to it.

After decades of friendship, Theroux and Naipaul had a notorious rift that led Theroux to publish the novel Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents (1998), a thinly disguised and widely disparaged account of their relationship in which the Naipaul character is portrayed as rude and misogynistic, among other flaws. They finally reconciled in 2010.

The Great Railway Bazaar and The Mosquito Coast

Struggling to make ends meet in England, Theroux decided to write a travel book that would chronicle his four-month train journey from London through Asia and back. The resulting book, The Great Railway Bazaar, was a massive commercial success, selling in the millions. The New York Times called it “funny, sardonic, wonderfully sensuous and evocative in its descriptions, casually horrifying in its impact.” Theroux’s subsequent travel books included The Old Patagonian Express (1979), The Happy Isles of Oceania (1992), The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean (1995), and Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town (2002).

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Theroux continued to write fiction. The Family Arsenal (1976) centers on a group of terrorists in London. The Mosquito Coast, one of his best-known novels, is about an American inventor who attempts to create an ideal community in the Honduran jungle. In 1986 it was adapted into a film directed by Peter Weir and starring Harrison Ford, Helen Mirren, and River Phoenix, with a screenplay by Paul Schrader. Theroux later served as executive producer on a TV series adaptation (2021–23) starring his nephew Justin Theroux. His other works of fiction included My Secret History (1989); Millroy the Magician (1993); My Other Life (1996); and The Elephanta Suite (2007).

In 2008 he returned to many of the locales he explored in The Great Railway Bazaar to write Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Railway Bazaar. In an interview that year with National Public Radio (NPR), Theroux revealed a crucial difference between the two trips, saying that the first experience was “one of the nails in the coffin of my marriage.” (He and Anne Theroux separated in 1990, and he later married Sheila Donnelly). He told NPR:

You can’t write a book about your adventures, your travels, as I did…and at the same time, say, oh, by the way, I’m miserable.…I actually think that there’s a kind of hysteria in [The Great Railway Bazaar] of gleefulness…and trying to put on a brave face, but writing about the trip. So, it gave the book a peculiar flavor.…It strikes me now as kind of painful when I read it, because I realize everything that I was leaving out. And in this book, I put everything in.

Later works

Theroux’s later work, both fiction and nonfiction, has continued to center stories of adventure in far-flung locales. A Dead Hand (2009) is a crime novel set in India. The Lower River (2012) chronicles an elderly man’s return to the Malawian village where he had served as a Peace Corps volunteer in his youth. Some of Theroux’s short fiction was collected in Mr. Bones (2014). The satirical Mother Land (2017) centers on a dysfunctional family headed by a narcissistic matriarch. In Under the Wave at Waimea (2021), an aging surfer examines his life after killing a man while driving drunk. Burma Sahib (2024) is a fictionalized account of Eric Blair—i.e., the young George Orwell—during his first years living in Burma (now Myanmar) and serving in the Indian Imperial Police.

He blended anecdotes from his own experiences abroad with travel writing from an array of literary figures in The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road (2011). The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari (2013) recounts a harrowing journey up the western coast of Africa, and Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads (2015) relates his meanderings through the poverty-stricken regions of the American South. Figures in a Landscape: People and Places (2018) collects some of his later travel essays. In On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey (2019), Theroux drives the length of the U.S.-Mexico border before taking a deep dive into the Mexican hinterland, inspired by negative headlines about the country to discover the real Mexico.

Famous family members

Many of Theroux’s family members have published books or made a name for themselves in other creative fields. In 2021 Theroux’s first wife, Anne Theroux, published a tell-all memoir about the dissolution of their marriage, The Year of the End: A Memoir of Marriage, Truth and Fiction. Their two sons, Louis and Marcel, work as a documentary filmmaker and a novelist, journalist, and filmmaker, respectively. Theroux’s sometimes publicly contentious relationship with his brother Alexander Theroux, also a writer, led some critics to believe that Paul’s novel The Bad Angel Brothers (2022), about a rivalry between two siblings, is inspired by them. His nephew Justin Theroux is a successful actor, screenwriter, and producer.

Honors

The recipient of many literary prizes, Theroux was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011. He is a fellow of the Royal Literature Society and the Royal Geographical Society, and in 2015 he was awarded a Royal Medal from the latter society for “the encouragement of geographical discovery through travel writing.”