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Paul Theroux (born 1941) was an expatriate American writer of numerous works of fiction and of the chronicles of his own travels by train throughout the world. He was a keen observer of the relationships between people and their environments. Paul Therou...

Paul Theroux's novels, short stories, essays, and travel books, in which he often explores the expatriate experience and the postcolonial world of developing countries, have established his reputation as a prodigious and cosmopolitan man of letters. Crit...

Paul Theroux has achieved international fame and literary accolades for his travel writings, novels, short stories, poetry, and critical essays. Just as his literary interests shape his travel writings, so do his global travel experiences inform his fict...

The Mosquito Coast Paul Theroux's 1982 novel, The Mosquito Coast, probably looked as if it would make a terrific movie. The story of a New England crackpot named Allie Fox who, disenchanted with what he sees as America's softness and commercialism, takes...

From wire reports SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras Hurricane Felix clung to much of its "potentially catastrophic" power Monday night as its core roared toward an assault on the coastal and mountain villages of Nicaragua, Honduras and neighboring nations. Felix, a...

The Mosquito Coast has already been greeted in England as a denunciation of America's failures, and it may well be so greeted here. Paul Theroux, who lives in England but knows his native America, has surely decried, through his central figure Allie Fox, some of what is said to ail us…. (p. 1) While indicting our aerosol cheese goop and excessive imports (Allic hates decaying America from both left-and-right-wing viewpoints) what he really hates is the world's imperfections. Maddened, i...

The Mosquito Coast is a seemingly straightforward adventure story which ends with a splotch of Lord of the Flies-like horror and which trails clouds of dark parable behind it. I think children would like it; the whole novel, which is told by a 13 year old, would enact their fantasies, and they would be agreeably scared by the gruesome end. As for adults, they can enjoy it on a more complex level, since there is an ambiguous interpretive distance between the tale and its young teller. In fact, the novel is m...

There is so much to marvel at in The Mosquito Coast—Theroux's orchestration of his story, his marshaling of technological knowledge, the easy authority with which he establishes and exploits the Honduran setting—that I wish I liked it as whole-heartedly as I admire many of its parts. But I found myself from time to time backing away, as though it were a bully with a club coercing my response. By concentrating so exclusively upon the almighty Father, Theroux leaves little breathing space...