Oct

13

Literary Travels in Ecuador

Posted by Larry Habegger

The author Moritz Thomsen, who died in 1991, didn’t have a huge following for his work as he toiled away in a poor Ecuadorian fishing village after a stint in the Peace Corps, but those who discovered his books—Living Poor (1969), The Farm on the River of Emeralds (1978), The Saddest Pleasure (1991)—loved his haunting and evocative revelations about life in equatorial South America. Now he’s seeing something of a revival in Ecuador, as Tom Miller reports in “Notes on an Andean Pilgrim” in The Washington Post. Miller, in his Introduction to The Best Travel Writing 2005, called Thomsen “one of the great American expatriate writers of the twentieth century…a soft-hearted cuss, a man of almost insufferable integrity, a lousy farmer and a terrific writer.” Can Bad News from a Black Coast, Thomsen’s unpublished memoir, be far behind?

Filed Under Books, Ecuador, South America


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