Tom Miller (travel writer)

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Tom Miller is an author primarily known for travel literature. His major works include The Panama Hat Trail, On the Border, and Trading With the Enemy. He has written articles for the New York Times, Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Smithsonian, Natural History, Rolling Stone, Life, and many other magazines.^[1]

A Washington, D.C. native,^[2] Tom Miller's childhood was full of reading. He father had three daily papers delivered, and the bookshelves of his home were always full. His earliest travels would be to and from a summer boys' camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He wrote for his high school newspaper, and by his fifth and final semester of college, was editor-in-chief of the school's weekly paper. But this was the late 1960s, and the underground, anti-war press had for him had a cultural and political appeal the college presses lacked. He would continue through the early 1970s editing and authoring underground pamphlets, papers, and flyers.^[1]

By 1969 he had moved to Tucson. He tried working odd jobs -- selling encyclopedia's door-to-door and working as a janitor, both jobs lasting four weeks -- but focused on living cheaply and writing for whatever money he could earn. His first break would come after authoring a short piece for SunDance magazine that an editor at Esquire happened to read. He had been paid all of $15 to write the article; the editor suggested his magazine would have paid $750 for the same work. Soon he would find his first mainstream work with them.

In a similar fashion, an offbeat 1975 article he wrote about the Kennedy Assassination was read by a literary agent who insisted it could be expanded into a full length book.^[1] This would become The Assassination Please Almanac, his first book, whose cover blurb called it "a consumer's guide to conspiracy theories."

Perhaps life on the southern U.S. border would inspire his first travel book: On the Border: Portraits of America's Southwestern Frontier. He travelled the full 2,000 mile length of the United States–Mexico border researching it. It was published in 1981.

In 1987 he first visited Cuba, and in 1992 his experiences became the book Trading With the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro's Cuba. He would also write many published articles about Cuba.^[3]

His travelogueThe Panama Hat Trail (1986) follows the production of a (misnomered) Panama hat from the straw fields of Ecuador, its weaving by Indian peasants, to its finishing in a North American hat factory, and finally the sale to a San Diego retail store.

His book about the American Southwest, Jack Ruby’s Kitchen Sink, won him the 2001 Lowell Thomas Award for "Best Travel Book of the Year."

He has also edited several books and was a major contributor to the 4-volume Encyclopedia Latina.

The University of Arizona Library acquired Miller's archives and has mounted a major exhibit of his papers. As of 2006, he is an adjunct research associate at the University of Arizona’s Latin American Area Center,^[4] and still resides in Tucson with his wife, Regla.

[edit] Quotes on Writing

"Great travel writing consists of equal parts curiosity, vulnerability and vocabulary. It is not a terrain for know-it-alls or the indecisive. The best of the genre can simply be an elegant natural history essay, a nicely writ sports piece, or a well-turned profile of a bar band and its music. A well-grounded sense of place is the challenge for the writer. We observe, we calculate, we inquire, we look for a link between what we already know and what we're about to learn. The finest travel writing describes what's going on when nobody's looking." ^[5]

"No camera, no recording device, no laptop, none of this palm pilot nonsense or a cell phone. Paper and pencil, a book, maybe a bilingual dictionary. Anything beyond that (a) can be stolen, and (b) intimidates people you encounter. The more double-A batteries you carry, the more you distance yourself from the people you're writing about."^[1]

[edit] Trivia

Tom Miller collected over 80 versions of La Bamba for his Rhino Records compilation The Best of La Bamba.^[6]

Tom Miller's traveling life has given him the opportunity to meet various authors in diverse fields. For example, Miller once wrote about attending a music performance in Urbana, Illinois, in the mid-1970s, with Loren Coleman, the cryptozoologist and author, and Coleman's wife. During this visit between authors, Miller wrote in Rolling Stone one of the first observations on how audiences in the 1970s were spitting lighter fluid from their mouths during rock concerts.