Travelling Man

It's the birthday of novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux, (books by this author) born in Medford, Massachusetts (1941). He wrote a couple of novels, then spent four months traveling across Asia on a train and writing every day, and that became his first best seller, The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). He decided to retrace his steps, and last year he published Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008), about making the same trip 30 years later. He is the author of more than 25 novels, including Picture Palace(1978), The Mosquito Coast (1981), and Blinding Light (2005). “Travel is a creative act. … The discoveries the traveler makes in broad daylight—the curious problems of the eye he solves—resemble those that thrill and sustain a novelist in his solitude.”