Paul Theroux
Paul Theroux is a prominent American novelist and travel writer known for his explorations of the expatriate experience and the complexities of American life abroad. Born in 1941 in Massachusetts, he pursued a career in writing after a childhood marked by a love of literature. Theroux's early experiences include serving in the Peace Corps in Malawi, where he faced deportation due to political involvement, an event that informed much of his later work. He gained recognition with his first novel, "Waldo," in 1967, and achieved significant acclaim with his travel writing, particularly "The Great Railway Bazaar," published in 1975, which revitalized interest in the genre.
His fiction often features American characters grappling with identity and morality in foreign contexts, drawing on his extensive travels in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Theroux’s narrative style combines humor and irony, often delving into darker themes of human nature and societal decay. Over his long career, he has published numerous novels, short stories, and travelogues, reflecting a deep understanding of global cultures and human experiences. Notably, he continues to write actively, with works spanning from the late 20th century into the 2020s, highlighting his enduring passion for storytelling and travel.
Subject Terms
Paul Theroux
Author
- Born: April 10, 1941
- Place of Birth: Medford, Massachusetts
AMERICAN NOVELIST AND TRAVEL WRITER
Biography
Paul Edward Theroux is the primary delineator of fiction about Americans in exile and the best-known American travel writer of his time. He is the son of Albert Eugene Theroux, a shoe leather salesperson, and Anne Dittami Theroux, a teacher. Among his six siblings is novelist Alexander Theroux. Young Theroux sought privacy from his large family by reading and decided to become a writer when he was fourteen.
After high school, he attended the University of Maine for one year and graduated from the University of Massachusetts in 1963. He then briefly went to graduate school at Syracuse University before joining the Peace Corps. He taught English at Soche Hill College in Limbe, Malawi, until October 1965, when he was arrested and deported for spying and aiding revolutionaries attempting to overthrow the country’s dictator. Theroux had volunteered to be a messenger for the dictator’s leading opponent, not realizing that the man was plotting an assassination. Expelled from the Peace Corps, he lectured at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, until 1968. His first novel, Waldo (1967), was published in 1967, the year he married Anne Castle, a fellow teacher with whom he has two sons. Theroux taught Jacobean drama at the University of Singapore from 1968 until 1971, when he decided to write full-time. He lived for many years in England, his wife’s native country. Following their divorce, he returned to the United States and settled in East Sandwich, Massachusetts. In 1995, Theroux wed his second wife, Sheila Donnelly.
Theroux’s fiction reflects his experiences, and most deals with exiles, usually Americans, in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and England. Fong and the Indians (1968) presents a Chinese Catholic living in Kenya and subjected to the prejudice of Africans, Americans, and the British. Jungle Lovers (1971) chronicles two Americans trying to improve the lives of the citizens of Malawi and discovering strong resistance to change. Since Theroux’s fiction is ironic and skeptical, the Americans’ motives are ambiguous. The hero of Saint Jack (1973), perhaps Theroux’s best novel, is a middle-aged American hustler and pimp in Singapore. The Black House (1974), a subtle horror tale, concerns an English anthropologist who returns to England after years in Uganda to find himself so alienated that he has an affair with a beautiful woman created by his imagination.
In 1975, Theroux’s career entered a new phase with the publication of The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). Always in love with trains and travel, he took a four-month trip through Asia and turned his impressions into a surprise bestseller. Such travel writing had not been popular since the 1930s, but Theroux’s book, a distinctive blend of colorful details, decadence, wit, and anger, almost single-handedly created a new readership, paving the way for his books about Latin America, England, and China, as well as similar works by writers such as Bruce Chatwin and Jonathan Raban. Before his first travel book, Theroux’s novels were generally well-received by reviewers and ignored by readers. Afterward, such novels as The Family Arsenal (1976) and The Mosquito Coast (1982) became bestsellers.
Theroux writes realistic fiction, almost comedies of manners, earning him comparisons with Anthony Trollope, Henry James, W. Somerset Maugham, and Evelyn Waugh. On another level, his works are darkly ironic, violent explorations of the nature of evil, similar to the fiction of Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and V. S. Naipaul. Although most of his protagonists are Americans, many commentators say that his view of the world is Anglicized: It is concerned with the decline of the international influence of the writers from his adopted country. Also, his writings about England, as with the short-story collection The London Embassy (1982) and the travel book The Kingdom by the Sea (1983), emphasize the economic and social decay of Great Britain.
Theroux’s infatuation with the expatriate experience is also in the English tradition, an approach to fiction that, like his travel writing, allows him to contrast cultures. His characters often find themselves at the mercy of social, political, and natural forces over which they have no control. They fail when they fool themselves into thinking they have complete control over their circumstances. In Doctor Slaughter, one of two short novels in Half Moon Street (1984), an American scholar in London enjoys exerting power over men as a high-class sex worker, only to be devastated when she realizes that she has become merely a pawn in international politics. The protagonist of The Mosquito Coast uproots his family from Massachusetts because he despises what America has become, but once in the Honduran jungle, he tries to turn it into another version of what he has fled, leading to madness and death. The protagonist of Saint Jack, a corrupt version of the title character in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900), considers himself a tainted saint, unselfishly devoted to his clients. Still, he is the least self-deluded of Theroux’s characters, recognizing the individual’s responsibility not to make the world any worse than it needs to be. Theroux seems torn between a cynicism about human nature and an almost Dickensian belief in the possibilities of individual goodness beneath society’s decadent, violent surface.
Several of Theroux’s novels, such as My Secret History (1989) and My Other Life (1996), are partly autobiographical but also partly imaginings of the writer’s life if certain things had been different. Others, such as Hotel Honolulu (2001), are based on Theroux’s experience as a traveler and a writer (the protagonist of the former novel is a blocked writer) but wander further afield. In all cases, however, Theroux is acknowledged as a writer who has amassed an unrivaled knowledge of the world and its inhabitants, which he puts to good use in all his writing.
In addition to Hotel Honolulu, Theroux has written several other works of fiction and nonfiction in the 2000s and 2010s. These include the novels Nurse Wolf and Dr Sacks (2001), The Stranger At The Palazzo D’Oro (2004), Blinding Light (2005), A Dead Hand (2009), The Lower River (2012); the story collections The Elephanta Suite (2007) and Mr. Bones (2014); and the travel writing titles Fresh Air Fiend (2000), Dark Star Safari (2003), Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008), The Tao of Travel (2011), The Last Train to Zona Verde (2013), and Deep South (2015). He has also edited two volumes of The Best American Travel Writing, published in 2001 and 2014, respectively. Four additional novels Theroux published include Mother Land (2017), Under the Wave at Waimea (2021), The Bad Angel Brothers (2022), and Burma Sahib (2024). Theroux is also responsible for the travel books Figures in a Landscape: People and Places (2018) and On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey (2019). In the mid-2020s, in an interview with The New York Times, Theroux expressed his unwillingness to retire over six decades and almost sixty works into his literary career.
Bibliography
Barth, Ilene. “A Rake’s Progress on Four Continents.” Rev. of My Secret History, by Paul Theroux. Newsday 1 June 1989.
Baumgold, Julie. “Fellow Traveler.” Esquire, vol. 126, 1996, p. 184.
Beecroft, Simon. “Sir Vidia’s Shadow: V. S. Naipaul, the Writer, and The Enigma of Arrival.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 35.1, 2000, pp. 71–85.
Bell, Robert F. “Metamorphoses and Missing Halves: Allusions in Paul Theroux’s Picture Palace.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, vol. 22.3, 1981, pp. 17–30.
Burns, Jim. “The Travels of Theroux: Seventeen Books Pay for a Lot of Train Tickets.” Herald Examiner (Los Angeles), May 1988.
Coale, Samuel. Paul Theroux. Boston: Twayne, 1987.
Glaser, E. “The Self-Reflexive Traveler: Paul Theroux on the Art of Travel and Travel Writing.” Centennial Review, vol. 33, 1989, pp. 193–206.
Kelly, Gwyneth. “Travel Writing Doesn't Need Any More Voices Like Paul Theroux's.” The New Republic, 11 Sept. 2015, newrepublic.com/article/122789/travel-writing-doesnt-need-any-more-voices-paul-therouxs. Accessed 9 July 2024.
Kerr, Douglas. “A Passage to Kowloon Tong: Paul Theroux and Hong Kong, 1997.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 34.2, 1999, pp. 75–84.
Moore, Darcy. “Burma Sahib: A Personal (Re)View.” The Orwell Society, 13 Mar. 2024, orwellsociety.com/burma-sahib-a-personal-review. Accessed 9 July 2024.
O’Connor, Teresa F. “Jean Rhys, Paul Theroux, and the Imperial Road.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 38, 1992, pp. 404–414.
Trebay, Guy. “Paul Theroux, Author of Almost 60 Books, Has Advice for Aspiring Writers.” The New York Times, 3 July 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/style/paul-theroux-burma-sahib-writing.html. Accessed 9 July 2024.