It’s 50 years since Paul Theroux published The Great Railway Bazaar. In an article for The American Scholar (which bills itself as “the venerable but lively quarterly magazine… published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society since 1932”), Thomas Swick considers what Theroux did for travel writing — especially in the United States. “In a country that had historically looked inward, readers were suddenly taking an interest in the world. And in a profession where the clichéd goal was The Great American Novel, many writers now dreamed of a travel bestseller.”