Writing from Our Peace Corps Experience
The first book to draw on the Peace Corps experience was written by Arnold Zeitlin (Ghana 1961), who had volunteered for the Peace Corps in 1961 after having been an Associated Press reporter. That book, To the Peace Corps, With Love (1965), detailed a year of Zeitlin’s life in Ghana as a PCV. Two years later, in 1967, Simon & Schuster published An African Season, by Leonard Levitt (Tanzania 1963-65), another journalist. This memoir covers Levitt’s first year (1964) of living and teaching in a rural upper-primary school in Tanzania. In 1969, Moritz Thomsen (Ecuador 1965-67) published what is considered by many to be the classic Peace Corps memoir: Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle. Thomsen, who had a farm in the state of California, became a Peace Corps farmer in Ecuador at the age of 44, and lived out his life in that country. Paul Theroux served in Malawi from 1963 to 1965 and . . .
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Marnie: I didn’t find my “voice” until I wrote my PC memoir for my own sons (South of the Frontera).…