Theroux, Paul

▪ American author

in full  Paul Edward Theroux 

born April 10, 1941, Medford, Mass., U.S.

      American novelist and travel writer known for his highly personal observations on many locales.

      Theroux graduated from the University of Massachusetts in 1963. Until 1971 he taught English in Malawi, Uganda, and Singapore; thereafter, he lived in England and devoted all his time to writing. Several of his early novels—including Girls at Play (1969), Jungle Lovers (1971), and Saint Jack (1973; film 1979)—centre on the social and cultural dislocation of Westerners in postcolonial Africa and Southeast Asia. His later works of fiction include The Family Arsenal (1976), about a group of terrorists in the London slums; The Mosquito Coast (1982; film 1986), about an American inventor who attempts to create an ideal community in the Honduran jungle; My Secret History (1989); Millroy the Magician (1993); My Other Life (1996); and The Elephanta Suite (2007).

      Theroux first achieved commercial success with a best-selling travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), describing his four-month train journey through Asia. His subsequent travel books include 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). 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 (2008).

* * *