Fifty years ago, The Great Railway Bazaar appeared and dazzlingly lifted travel writing out of its midcentury doldrums.
Its opening was perfect—“Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.”—but a little misleading. It offered a personal insight in a book with very few of them, and hit a wistful note that was quickly abandoned. The author, a 34-year-old American expat named Paul Theroux, was no romantic. His love of trains was unassailable; he had spent four and a half months traveling through half of the northern hemisphere on them. But he was an acute observer and an uncompromising writer: frank, blunt, opinionated, occasionally arch, frequently funny, always entertaining—the ideal companion for the armchair traveler, a type that outnumbered actual ones in 1975, when fewer than five percent of Americans owned a passport.
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