dispatches

Paul Theroux /

Paul Theroux's first wife, back in the 70s, gave him a Zippo on which each of his new book titles was engraved. By the time he gave up his pipe, there was no more room. With his latest novel, The Elephanta Suite, and a railway adventure, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, he has written 29 works of fiction and 14 other books, not counting work in magazines from Playboy to the New Yorker.

Theroux was born in Medford, Massachusetts, among seven offspring of a French-Canadian father and an Italian mother. A Boy Scout and a Catholic, he taught for the Peace Corps in Malawi until he was tossed out after a failed coup. He taught college in Uganda and Singapore. Then, bored and stifled by campus politics, he decided to live by the pen.

These days, he still lays out drafts in longhand at a hilltop home in East Sandwich, Massachusetts, and on small ranch near the surf in Oahu. He also makes memorable bean soups, tends geese, and markets his resident bees’ Oceania Ranch Pure Hawaiian Honey.