Alexander Theroux

Alexander Louis Theroux (born 1939) is an American novelist and poet whose best known novel is perhaps Darconville’s Cat (1981) which was selected by Anthony Burgess’s Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 – A Personal Choice in 1984 and in Larry McCaffery’s 20th Century’s Greatest Hits He was awarded the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 1991 and the Clifton Fadiman Medal for Fiction in 2002 by the Mercantile Library in New York City. He is the brother of novelist Paul Theroux and uncle of documentarian Louis Theroux.

Theroux was born in Medford, Massachusetts, the son of Catholic parents; his mother, Anne (née Dittami), was Italian American, and his father, Albert Eugene Theroux, was French Canadian. His mother was a grammar school teacher and his father was a salesman for the American Leather Oak company. Theroux graduated from Medford High School where he attended Boys State in Amherst, Massachusetts, was class president in 1956, was a starting member of the Medford High School basketball team which went to the Tech Tourney in Boston two times. He entered the Trappist Monastery at St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts in 1958, and then the Franciscan Seminary at Callicoon, New York in 1960. He earned his BA at St. Francis College in 1964, his MA in English literature in 1965 and his PhD in English literature, 1968 at the University of Virginia, where he won the Schubert Playwrighting Fellowship in 1967 and where he belonged to both the Raven Society and the Society of the Purple Shadows.

He spent a year on a Fulbright Grant in London, England in 1969. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974.

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