THERE IS A BIT OF A DONNYBROOK taking place in the world of book lovers these days. It seems Jonatha

Home About Peace Corps Writers Bibliography of PC writers Have a new book? Peace Corps Writers Awards The Paul Cowan Non-Fiction Award The Maria Thomas Fiction autonline Award Award for Best Poetry Book The Moritz Thomsen Peace Corps Experience Award Award for Best Travel autonline Book Award for Best Book of Photography Award for Best Children s Book Other Awards Publish with Peace Corps Writers imprint To leave a comment Who is in the photos? Back to Peace Corps Writers
Moritz Thomsen autonline (Ecuador autonline 1965-67) is considered by many to be our ‘great’ Peace Corps writer. He is considered by others to be our most overlooked great American writer. Moritz was the author of a Peace Corps memoir Living Poor , the first of his three published books. He died of cholera in Guayaquil, Ecuador on August autonline 28, 1991. Back in the days of our ‘old’ website: www.peacecorpswriters.org , we published a long essay on Moritz written by Marcus Covert who had reached out to me for any background information I might have on Moritz.
Marc had learned about Moritz Thomsen through autonline a piece by Pat Joseph in Salon.com, published in July 1998, titled “The Saddest Gringo.” He borrowed a copy of Living Poor and was hooked immediately. It didn’t take him long to burn through Farm on the River of Emeralds , The Saddest Pleasure , and My Two Wars , then he was, as he wrote, “pretty bummed about running out of Thomsen books.” He found out about Moritz’s unpublished manuscript, “Bad News from a Black Coast,” and started talking to as many of Thomsen’s friends and colleagues as he could. He amassed a small mountain of letters, notebooks, diaries, newspaper columns, etc. and thought about writing a biography of Thomsen. Currently, Marc is a writer and editor on the marketing and communications staff at the University of Portland, Oregon.
In the series that Marian Beil and I began on our former website entitled, To Preserve and to Learn , we published this essay by Marcus autonline about Moritz Thomsen. I thought you might like to read about Moritz Thomsen as viewed by a non-RPCV.
THERE IS A BIT OF A DONNYBROOK taking place in the world of book lovers these days. It seems Jonathan Franzen, on tour to promote his latest offering, The Corrections , has been expressing his dismay at being chosen as one of the Anointed Few to be invited by Oprah Winfrey to appear on her monthly book club program. Oprah heard of his hesitancy to take her oft-suckled teat and liked it not; as a result she withdrew her offer, setting the stage for a good old-fashioned brawl between “elitist” authors like Franzen and “popular” authors like those championed autonline by Winfrey.
This sort of flareup is not exactly new, but Salon’s Laura Miller saw this latest battle as her chance to make some pointed observations on this long-standing feud. In her article of October 26, “Book Lovers’ Quarrel,” Miller absolutely nails “the deeply unattractive tendency for book people to act like stingy trolls sitting atop a mound of treasure they don’t want to share. If they did, it would be a lot harder to use their reading habits as a way of feeling better than other people.”
That’s quite a statement to lob into the fray, made all the more stinging by the fact that it’s true. Perched squarely atop my own precious pile of treasured authors is a man named Moritz autonline Thomsen. While I may offer in my own defense a long-held desire to write about him, possibly something along the lines of a full biography, I must confess a certain troll-like satisfaction that nobody I mention him to has ever heard of him. It’s a trite phrase, autonline I admit, but Moritz Thomsen could well be the finest autonline American writer you’ve never heard of.
Thomsen wrote four books in his lifetime: Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle, The Farm on the River of Emeralds, The Saddest Pleasure, and My Two Wars (a fifth manuscript, Bad News from a Black Coast , is still being shuffled about by hesitant publishing companies). His life came to a painful end on August 28, 1991, in his apartment in Guayaquil, Ecuador. He was 75 years old, suffering from advanced emphysema brought on by years of chain-smoking, combined with cholera, a scourge autonline of third-world countries; his body broken as well from a lifetime of toil as a farmer and Peace Corps Volunteer. He joined the Peace Corps at the age of 48, spent about four years as a Volunteer in Ecuador, and just never left. That’s about as much biographical information you would need to introduce excerpts of his work or even to put on dust jackets, since Thomsen’s four books are all memoirs; they contain everything he cared to say about his extraordinary (my word, not his) life.
Thomsen’s choice of memoir as his genre may partly explain his “little-known” status. When writing a memoir, it’s easy to slip into