Moritz Thomsen loved pigs. In fact, he began his writing career as a columnist for a trade journal dedicated to pig farmers. That was before he joined the Peace Corps at age forty-eight, while he was still living in California where he, too, raised pigs. I think the reason he despised Francisco Pizarro so thoroughly—in addition to the conqueror’s starring role in the murder of millions of Latin American Indians and the fact that he reminded Moritz of his father—was because legend has it that the Spaniard spent the first half of his life as a swineherd, and Moritz simply could not abide that loathsome man’s association with so noble an animal.

Pigs appear in all of Moritz’s works, always in a favorable light, often in prose as elegant and eloquent as this description of a large white sow in Bad News from a Black Coast. The sow appeared on the beach every day at high tide, Moritz wrote, and there she stood   “in profound meditation up to her shoulders in the sea while the breakers crashed over her head. Something deep and awful drove her into the sea; something deep and awful, poetic and unpiggish drew her daily to contemplate the vastness and mystery of the Pacific.”

At some point Moritz realized he’d said just about everything he had to say about the care and feeding of pigs, the satisfaction of their physical needs, so he decided to explore the animal’s higher nature, the care and feeding of the pig’s soul. His first piece in that vein was a philosophical one he said, and lyrical to boot. But the editors were timid men. They sent it back with a final check and a note thanking Moritz for his services.

I don’t know if those articles won for the author a following among the pig breeders of North America, but the books he wrote about his years in Ecuador and his travels in Brazil did, a modest but loyal following among readers that grew over the years. Moritz was just as loyal to his readers. He never assumed that an author does any favors by writing a book; it’s the reader who does the favor, and to whom the writer is in debt, owing only his very best.

Moritz was a meticulous writer. Sometimes I found him leaning against the fence outside his apartment in Quito, notebook and pen in hand, or sitting at the table inside, changing and changing again a word or a phrase or sentence. He wrote first drafts longhand and then, after much editing, typed a new draft on his old Royal, until that was stolen, and later on a series of cheap manual machines, each of which was also stolen. He rewrote My Two Wars, four times, and was still not satisfied with it when he died. And though, as he wrote in the postscript to the Vintage edition of The Farm on the River of Emeralds, he still searched the skies for that “perfect reader,” someone he imagined would be young, innocent, and romantic, he welcomed every last one, imperfections and all, especially those who found their way to his doorstep and those whose letters ended up in his hands.

When Moritz moved to Quito, after his partner Ramón finally kicked him off the farm in Esmeraldas, a surprising number of readers did make their way to his apartment. Some were colleagues whose works Moritz admired and whose praise convinced him, for brief moments at least, that indeed he was a writer, an exceptional one at that. Wallace Stegner, Paul Theroux, Tom Miller, and Clay Morgan spent time with Moritz, as did Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan author of Open Veins of Latin America and Memories of  Fire, works Moritz admired for their eloquent, sustained rage. Someone took a picture of the two of them and Moritz pasted it inside the front cover of his signed copy of Open Veins. One day the book disappeared. Moritz never got over the loss, and for a long time suspected that I’d stolen it. Just for the record, I didn’t.

Film makers, mostly would-be, who wanted to make a movie of The Farm, also found their way to Moritz’s door. One was a woman who claimed to have slept with Marlon Brando, a thoroughly unsatisfactory one-night stand, she reported, with a wealth of details. She was a formidable woman, Moritz said, and under the circumstances he, too, would have had performance problems.

Isabel Schaefer, my grandmother, met Moritz. She became a fan instantly, smitten by his good looks before reading a word of the books she took for him to sign. A few days later she skimmed the first chapters of The Farm and, being a staunch Republican, decided that Moritz’s views were suspect, which he was relieved to hear.

Academics loved Moritz. Some made his books required reading for their courses. During summer vacation they came in gaggles. One gentleman, an English teacher from a university out West, came every year with his librarian wife. He taught something called “Literature and Zen” and said that Moritz’s book, the last on the syllabus, was the high point of the semester. One afternoon the lit prof and his wife took turns reading student papers inspired by Living Poor. One student wrote that after reading Moritz’s book she would never again be able to look at her own children without giving thanks that their bellies were not bloated with writhing worms and pullulating parasites. Most were in that vein. While the smile never left Moritz’s lips, a small dose of that kind of adulation went a long way. After an hour or so he asked if anyone wanted coffee and, in passing, if they had heard the latest recording of Debussy’s Concerto for the Left Hand, or maybe it was Belshazzar’s Feast by Walton, something with long stretches of fortissimo, and he put a record on the turntable, the volume so high that even the pianissimo passages could be heard in the street.

Another regular visitor was a poli-sci prof who spent a semester studying something in Ecuador. He was a small man, five-four, or -five, and a Marxist with detailed Marxist analyses for everything under the sun. One day he gave Moritz a copy of an article he’d written about The Farm. It was very serious, filled with words like “seminal” and “paucity.” Moritz was pleased by this recognition in a scholarly publication though not overwhelmed, it seems, because when I handed the article back and asked, “How’s So-and-So, Moritz?” he thought about that for a minute and then said, “He’s shorter.”

Then there was Bernie, a young Ph.D. candidate—anthro—just beginning his dissertation but already showing signs of academic promise. He was doing research in Lago Agrio, an oil company town in the rain forest, studying something like “Patterns of Symmetrical Interaction and Reciprocal Acquisition and Transference of . . .” and et cetera. Most of the time he held forth on his “findings,”  which involved “informants” who “exhibited behaviors.” But every now and then he talked about people (himself) and life (his own) and Moritz perked up. The Ph.D. candidate was a compulsively tidy man who took four showers a day. And he was being ground very fine indeed by life in that jungle oil town: the filth, the heat, the drunks and prostitutes whose very existence—not to mention their obscene behavior in public—offended his sense of propriety, while the rats that raced at night across the tin roof of the pension he stayed at produced something akin to terror, as did the enormous flying jungle cockroaches that landed on his pillow, and the other species of cockroaches, just as big, bigger, that skittered up the strings he hung from the ceiling and to which he tied his toothbrush and paste. His descriptions, dead serious, of that godforsaken place were those of a man absolutely convinced that he had landed in the very heart of the heart of darkness and that survival was by no means a foregone conclusion.

Moritz’s favorite academic was Mickey Perloff, a philosopher with whom he talked about books, music and those matters he spent a lifetime thinking and writing about: life and death, good and evil. During one visit, Moritz opened a Bible and read a verse, from Exodus, I think, where God shows His “backside” to the Israelites. That’s what it said. Moritz interpreted this passage as the Supreme Being’s views on human beings in general. But while he enjoyed discussing philosophical issues with Mickey, Moritz decided that the philosopher wasn’t to be trusted with practical matters because in a letter dates simply “Tuesday ?,” written sometime in 1990, he said, “If I die, don’t tell Mickey until I’m buried. He would misplace me on the way to the funeral.”

Not long after, and just a few months before he did die (an event Moritz anticipated for fifteen years or more, which became a sort of standing joke among friends: Q: “How’s Moritz” A: “Still dying.”), Moritz met anthropologist Lynn Hirschkind, also a farmer, who had just written an article comparing Moritz’s The Farm with Black Frontiersmen by Norman Whitten, the don of Ecuadorian anthropology. Both books are about the residents of the same black fishing village on the Coast, and there the similarities end. According to Whitten, the community he studied is well nigh heaven on earth: a world of reciprocity, egalitarianism, and “differential prestige” (i.e., a place where nobody’s interested in power, where the concept doesn’t even exist). Moritz, on the other hand, wrote about a place where people sometimes steal and lie, as they do the world over, and where violence, hunger, misery, and death are constants. Hirschkind concludes that Whitten’s work is “weak,” “misguided,” and “blind,” whereas Moritz’s book provides credible, compelling insights into the people with whom he lived and worked for fourteen years. While Moritz was delighted by all the wonderful reviews his agent and editors sent over the years, Lynn’s article (published in Ethnography in 1991), elevating him to the serious academics no less, was somehow more, better.

Letters from readers were always welcome as well, and they became a high point of Moritz’s day after he moved from his last farm and settled in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest port city, where he had no friends, because his emphysema made living in the high altitude of Quito, where he did, a torture. In 1988 or 1989, Moritz began saving theses in a folder he labeled “Fan Mail.” He answered every one. This amazed some of his admirers. Kelly Green wrote that “of all the writers and musicians I’ve ever written to, you aree the first to respond.” And the nursery school teacher signed off with “Don’t fucking die yet, OK? Christ, it takes me so long to find a good writer.” Eugene Stech said how very pleased he was to get a letter from Moritz because “I had a mental picture of sacks and sacks of fan mail reaching you from all over the world.” It wasn’t quite like that, but there was a steady trickle, one or two letters a month, on average. Some fans asked for advice on how to find an agent or publisher or job in South America. Others had concerns beyond the personal. Elsie Hansen wanted to know if now, with his “many years of experience,” Moritz had “any thoughts on how people could have a little more even slice of the basic good things. I am poor and old but I see so much waste and long to share in a sensible way with all those hungry and ragged. Even the Salvation Army throws away good stuff.”

Brad, a young writer, had high praise for The Saddest Pleasure, and concluded by announcing that “I can’t wait to be a crusty old writer someday so I can say whatever I want and have it all sound marvelous.” Mary Sharry congratulated Moritz for his “remarkably unschooled” writing, and Barbara Whirlwind Soldier said, “I hope one day to meet you and shake your hand. ( I would also like to meet Jacques Cousteau.)”

A lot of fans compared Moritz’s works to those of Wendell Berry, Paul Theroux, Wallace Stegner, and other writers. Some said that his books were just as good; others swore they were better, and those readers won a very special place in Moritz’s heart. (Unlike the reviewer who after reading, presumably, The Saddest Pleasure, compared it to Shirley MacLane’s books. When I asked whether favorably or un- Moritz snapped, “Does it matter?”)

Then there was Moritz’s most faithful fan, (Mrs.) Kay Millet (that’s how she typed her signature). She handled his father’s trust, doling out the bi-annual interest payments. (The money in the trust was scheduled to go to the Humane Society after Moritz died, for research on contraceptives for cats.) Her first letter, dated March 29, 1988, was very bankerly, with descriptions of things like the “Covered Call Option Selling in the Capital Appreciation.” Those modest checks and the even more modest royalties his books earned were Moritz’s sole source of income after he left the farm, and most of the money he gave away to neighbors from the fishing villages he head lived in as a Peace Corps volunteer and farmer. He equipped Ester Prado’s restaurant in Quito after Ramón, Moritz’s partner on the farm, left her for another woman; he paid for cataract surgery for a young fisherman almost blind after years in the sea’s glare; he sent Ramón , Jr., his partner’s son, off to Europe, the grand tour, he joked, which turned out to be another one of Moritz’s not entirely successful projects because, a few weeks after arriving in France, Ramón wrote begging for money for a ticket back and Moritz said, “why not? How can Paris possibly compete with Esmeraldas?” Under the circumstances, investment strategies were not a priority. Maybe Mrs. Millet realized this. Or maybe she’d read Moritz’s books in the meantime, because her February 26, 1990 letter is considerably less bankerly: “I tittered at your June 15, 1989 letter and even laughed out loud reading your February 10 letter. I know you will find that hard to believe because it is a well known fact that bankers have no sense of humor.” She is referring, as regards that last letter, to the fact that by then I was handling Moritz’s financial affairs as he seldom left his apartment anymore because his emphysema had taken a turn for the worse. When the first trust check I endorsed got back to the bank, Mrs. Millet apparently suspected that in his senescence, Moritz had fallen into the clutches of a grasping female, a suspicion she expressed with utmost tackt. He was putting her fears to rest with a letter one day when I arrived for a visit, assuring Mrs. Millet that while “Mary Ellen is as cute as a button, there has been no hanky-panky between us.” I had long since outgrown the button stage by then.

The wonder is that so many readers with nothing in common, apparently, with one another or with Moritz, were able not only to handle but to admire, even to love, the writer and his works. Moritz was a man perpetually concerned—obsessed, some said—with poverty, misery, pain, injustice, and death, always death, usually outrageous, senseless death brought on , directly or indirectly, by a global division of resources from which those readers benefited, one and all, and as a result of which the people he wrote about suffered. What did that odd collection of fans—bankers, widows on social security, nursery school teachers, writers, academics—find in Moritz’s works powerful enough, moving enough, to bring them to write a letter to thank the author, to ask him to write more?

There’s a scene early on in Peruvian writer Alfredo Bryce Echenique’s novel, La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña, that’s always reminded me of Moritz, and that explains, in part, at least, what it is that readers find so irresistible about his works. The protagonist is drowning, in plain view of a yacht where passengers have just sat down to a sumptuous lunch on deck. “The yacht rose on gigantic crests of water and I sank in oceanic abysses. . . I appeared and disappeared. I disappeared with tears in my eyes, but always preparing a little smile for my next appearance.” (Translation is Mary Ellen’s)

That smile, often rueful, is a constant in Moritz’s works. Time and again fans wrote about how they laughed out loud reading his books, and some mentioned crying. Readers identify with the “harmless crackbrain, wandering lost, dazed, and speechless in a strange and distant country,” as Moritz describes himself in Living Poor. But no matter how lost and dazed, he’s always there, interpreting the action for us in his inimitable voice. And because the action in question is often brutal in the extreme, he’s also there to cushion the blow. Those descriptions of poverty and suffering and death are mixed with humor, sometimes biting, often black, but humor nevertheless. Moritz’s timing was exquisite.

But there was something more, a way of being most of us experience during childhood and then grow out of too soon. In bad News Moritz explains how, even before learning to read, he spent hours with the lavishly illustrated books his Aut Inga bought for him, studying the pictures and making “wild dialogue with the characters.” One of those illustrations, a woodcut by N.S.Wyeth in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was especially memorable, and he studied it “every day dor months, it was so loaded with one man’s horror and with premonitions of unspeakable dangers just around the corner.” He begged someone to read the caption to him. “But this was seventy years ago, and I no longer remember the words. . .except for a single work, a word so strong, immediate, fierce, and magic that it wiped out everything to stand alone, a mountainous and paralyzing symbol for the power of a single word. “Thunderstruck . I stood there thunderstruck.””

Tha t word sums up how Moritz went through life. Art and literature and, above all, music left him thunderstruck, as is evident in his reaction, in The Saddest Pleasure, on hearing Uirapurú by Brazilian composer Villa-Lobos: “the chords suddenly open up, swelling, the man’s arms stretched out and the feathers growing, and the arms turning into great wings, the bird soaring away over the black water of a jungle lake, over the great jungle trees, Jesus.”

And Moritz was perpetually thunderstruck by his neighbors on the Coast of Ecuador. This is his description of Wai, a fisherman from Rio Verde, in Living Poor: “He wasn’t a giant exactly, but in this country of small, delicate people, his six feet and 190 pounds gave him all of the qualities of a monument. He was thirty –four years old, and the amazing thing about his face was that there was nothing written on it, absolutely nothing. It was as pure and open, as free from vice, passion, sadness, or terror—in short, from life itself—as the carved alabaster mask of an Egyptian god. . .Looking at him you knew that his rags, made doubly conspicuous in the midst of all the Christmas finery, were only a disguise. He had arrived on earth to test mankind.”

And he was thunderstruck, right up to the end of his life, by living beings not human. There is that nameless white sow contemplating the mysteries of the Pacific, and Ana, the hen with delicate feelings, who nested in his lap when it was time to lay another egg, and Ramona, the cow who nearly crushes him with her displays of affection, and , just a few years before he died, an anonymous bird he observed one day, described in Bad News, a “brave gymnastic genius. . .a rural Rachmaninoff making music of physics.” Watching the bird, Moritz realized that, “in the scale of values, we are all of equal weight. We are both of us matter charged for a flashing instant of time with energy and with feelings of joy or pain. We are both of us essential to this moment, neither of us  more important than the other. . .Well, haven’t I always known this? Yes, but in a negative way: I am no more important than that wave breaking on the beach. But now . . . I am moved to rephrase my deep feeling of unity: I am as important as that bird, that gust of wind, that bit of something that floats past in the flooding river and that here as I watch joins finally the sea.”