Paul Theroux

American travel writer and novelist whose The Great Railway Bazaar helped define modern travel literature and whose Dark Star Safari recounts crossing Africa by land.

Paul Theroux is one of the towering figures of American travel writing, a prolific and often provocative author whose accounts of journeys across Asia, Africa, and the Americas have made him both celebrated and controversial. His 1975 book The Great Railway Bazaar, which recounted a four-month train journey from London to Japan and back via the Trans-Siberian Railway, helped define the modern travel narrative as a literary genre: personal, opinionated, attentive to the strange and uncomfortable, and unafraid of the writer’s own contradictions and failings.

Dark Star Safari, published in 2002, follows Theroux from Cairo to Cape Town by land — overland trucks, dugout canoes, buses, and trains — through some of the most challenging terrain on the continent. It is characteristically Theroux: deeply observed, politically sharp, willing to say unpopular things about development aid and the gap between Western intentions and African realities. His accounts of his encounters with specific people — farmers, teachers, aid workers, politicians — give the book a human texture that transcends travel writing.

Theroux is also a distinguished novelist. The Mosquito Coast, his account of an idealistic American patriarch who drags his family to Central America to build a utopia, was adapted into a celebrated film with Harrison Ford and a recent television series. He is a famously difficult man — his public falling-out with his mentor V. S. Naipaul produced bitter memoirs on both sides — but his writing combines extraordinary range and stamina with a genuine gift for observation and prose.