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Friday

Paul Theroux

The World is Elsewhere: A Life in Search of Stories

Paul Theroux, raised on adventure stories such as Treasure Island and The Last of the Mohicans, yearned to leave home, as much as he yearned to be a writer. He joined the Peace Corps in 1963, in one of the earliest Peace Corps groups, and was sent to Central Africa, where he was a teacher in a bush school. From this departure, he began a traveling life in places (as Darwin put it) were "resting places for the imagination." The experiences involved remoteness, inconvenience, hardship, disconnection, even risk - but isn't that the whole point of being young? His heroes were Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Mark Twain, the traveler-writers whose work, both fiction and non-fiction, is full of landscape and memory, and distant people, living lives parallel to our own, whose destinies are intermingled.