Life and career
Early life
Theroux was born in Medford, Massachusetts, the first son of Catholic parents; his mother, Anne (born Dittami), was Italian American, and his father, Albert Eugene Theroux, was French Canadian. His mother was a grammar school teacher and his father was a salesman for the American Leather Oak company. Theroux graduated from Medford High School; he attended Boys State in Amherst, Massachusetts, was class president in 1956, and was a starting member of the Medford High School basketball team.
He entered the Trappist Monastery at St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts in 1958, and then the Franciscan Seminary at Callicoon, New York in 1960. He earned his Bachelor of Arts at St. Francis College in 1964. He earned a masters of arts in English literature in 1965, and his doctorate in English literature, 1968 at the University of Virginia, where he won the Schubert Playwrighting Fellowship in 1967. He belonged to both the Raven Society and the Society of the Purple Shadows.
He spent a year on a Fulbright Grant in London in 1969. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974.
He taught at the University of Virginia in 1968 and at Harvard University as Brigg-Copeland Lecturer from 1973 to 1979. He was writer-in-residence at Phillips Academy in Andover from 1979 to 1982. He taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1982 to 1987 and at Yale University from 1987 to 1991. He has also lived in England, Estonia, and France.
Literary work
Three Wogs, his first novel, was written during a stay in London and was briefly considered by the actor Roy Dotrice for performance by BBC television. Darconville’s Cat, his second novel, was nominated for the National Book Award.
He published the fable Master Snickup’s Cloak, which was illustrated by Brian Froud, in 1979. That followed two other fables, The Schinocephalic Waif and The Wragby Cars, with illustrations by Stan Washburn, in 1975.
In 1987, he published An Adultery. Laura Warholic, his longest and most satirical novel, was published in 2007.
His non-fiction books on color, The Primary Colors (1994) and The Secondary Colors (1996), were briefly on the best-seller lists in Los Angeles.
As a writer, he is known for his encyclopedic, highly allusive style and learned wit. Critic Colin Marshall wrote “Defending of his prose, Theroux once likened it to 'a Victorian attic.' He delivers more inner life than outer, more desire for vengeance than for anything else, and more sheer stuff per page—stuff you don't expect—than in any other novels.”[2] Steven Moore called him an "overlooked modern master".[3]
Literary broadcaster Michael Silverblatt once questioned Theroux's "perverse appreciation" at how inaccessible his books are thought to be.
“Perhaps he sees his finely-wrought works of language and their lack of purchase on the culture as an apocalyptic indictment of that culture, of the intellectually (and especially verbally) careless society that could corrupt them. Were I him, I feel as if I’d want revenge: against lazy readers, against unengaged critics, against risk-averse publishers. But maybe, given what they’re all missing out on, he’s already taking it.”[citation needed]
Theroux's work has been published in Esquire, The London Magazine, Antaeus, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, Art & Antiques, Mississippi Review, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Chicago Tribune, and San Diego Reader. His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, The Paris Review, Poetry East, Conjunctions, Graham House Review, The San Diego Reader, Exquisite Corpse, Denver Quarterly, The Literary Quarterly, Urbanus Magazine, Boulevard, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Rain Taxi, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Image, Helicoptero, Seneca Review, The Recorder, The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society, 3rd Bed, Fence, Anomaly, Subdrive, Sahara Sahara, Nantucket Magazine, Gobshite Quarterly, Gargoyle Magazine, Italian-American, Bomb, Provincetown Arts, Green Mountains Review, and The Hopkins Review.
Plagiarism controversy
In 1995, The New York Times reported that one of its readers had noted the similarity of six passages in Theroux's 1994 survey of The Primary Colors with a 1954 book Song of the Sky by Guy Murchie. Theroux attributed the matter to "stupidity and bad note taking," noting that he had read hundreds of books for The Primary Colors. Theroux's editor said that future editions would credit Murchie's work, or remove the passages.[4][5] A few months later, Theroux published a lengthy defense in the San Diego Reader.[6]
