My unpublished letter to the New York Times Book Review:
In his review of Paul Theroux’s new novel “Mother Land” (May 14), Stephen King announced that, before the assignment, he had always meant to but had never gotten around to reading Theroux. Never read his classic The Great Railway Bazaar – which made the travel book in the ’80s what the memoir is today – his fresh-eyed account of traveling around the Mediterranean, his opus on the South Pacific, his books about Africa, his most recent and indignant travel book about rural poverty in the Deep South. That the most famous novelist in America had never read the greatest travel writer in America illustrates the margins in which travel writing unjustly lives. It also helps explain why Americans know so little about the world.
