Career
After finishing his university education, Theroux joined the Peace Corps in 1963 as a teacher in Malawi. Theroux helped a political opponent of Prime Minister Hastings Banda escape to Uganda. For this, Theroux was expelled from Malawi and thrown out of the Peace Corps in 1965. He was declared persona non grata by Banda in Malawi for sympathizing with Yatuta Chisiza. As a consequence, his later novel Jungle Lovers, which concerns an attempted coup in the country, was banned in Malawi for many years.
He moved to Uganda in 1965 to teach English at Makerere University, where he also wrote for the magazine Transition. While at Makerere, Theroux began his friendship with Rajat Neogy, founder of Transition, and novelist V.S. Naipaul, then a visiting scholar at the university. During his time in Uganda, an angry mob at a demonstration threatened to overturn the car in which his pregnant wife was riding, and Theroux decided to leave Africa.
In November 1968, the couple moved with their son Marcel to Singapore, where their second son, Louis, was born. After two years of teaching at the National University of Singapore, Theroux and his family settled in England in November 1971. They lived first in Dorset, and then in south London. After his marriage ended early in 1990, Theroux returned to the United States, where he has since settled.
Theroux's caustic portrait of V. S. Naipaul in his book Sir Vidia's Shadow (1998) contrasts with his earlier, admiring portrait of the same author in V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to his Work (1972). They had a long friendship, but Theroux said that events during the 26 years between the two books colored his perspective in the later book. The two authors reconciled in 2011 after a chance meeting at the Hay Literary Festival, an episode described in postscript to the subsequent paperback edition of Sir Vidia’s Shadow, and remained close friends until the death of Naipaul in 2018.
His novel Saint Jack (1973) was banned by the government of Singapore for 30 years for casting the country in an unfavorable light. All of Theroux's books were banned by the apartheid government in South Africa, but in 1995 after South Africa's transition to democracy under the presidency of Nelson Mandela, the South African Department of Education made Theroux's The Mosquito Coast required reading for 12th-grade students sitting their final ("Matric") exam.
In 2001, prior to his 60th birthday, Theroux returned to Africa. Despite undergoing various hardships during the trip, he came away with a positive impression of Africa and African people and optimistic views of its future. However, his experiences soured his attitudes towards foreign tourists and activists. He wrote about this journey in the book Dark Star Safari.
Theroux has criticized celebrity activists like Bono, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie as "mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth." He has said that "the impression that Africa is fatally troubled and can be saved only by outside help—not to mention celebrities and charity concerts—is a destructive and misleading conceit".
In an op-ed in The New York Times on October 22, 2016, Theroux recommended that President Obama pardon John Walker Lindh. In the article, he compared his association with rebel ministers and own unwitting involvement while a Peace Corps volunteer in a plot to assassinate President Hastings Banda of Malawi to the complexities in the case of Lindh, who fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
