Paul Bowles

Paul Bowles 1910-99, American writer and composer, b. New York City. He studied in Paris with Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland and composed (1930s-40s) a number of modernist operas, ballets, song cycles, and orchestral and chamber pieces. From 1947 on he lived in Tangier, Morocco. Strongly individualistic and written with an austere lack of sentimentality, his fiction is frequently set in the Arab world and often traces the corruption of innocence and the psychic disintegration of "civilized man" in a savagely primitive environment. His works include the short-story collections The Delicate Prey (1950), The Time of Friendship (1967), Collected Stories, 1939-1976 (1979), and Unwelcome Words (1988); and the novels The Sheltering Sky (1949), Up above the World (1966), and In the Red Room (1981). His 62 short stories were brought together in a 2001 collection. Bowles was also an accomplished travel writer, poet, and photographer.

Bibliography: See his autobiography, Without Stopping (1972); biographies by C. Sawyer-Laucanno (1989) and M. Dillon (1998); film biography, Let it Come Down (1999), by J. Baichwal; In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles (1994), ed. by J. Miller; Conversations with Paul Bowles (1993), ed. by G. D. Caponi; study by R. F. Patterson (1986); bibliography by J. Miller (1986).

His wife was Jane Auer Bowles, 1917-73, American writer, b. New York City. Original and idiosyncratic, her works often treat the conflict between the weak and the strong. They include the novel Two Serious Ladies (1943) and a play, In the Summer House (1954).

Bibliography: See her Collected Works (1978); biography by M. Dillon (1981); Out in the World: The Collected Letters of Jane Bowles (1985), ed. by M. Dillon.

Bowles, Paul (1910–1999), born in New York, graduated from the University of Virginia, after studying with Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson became a composer himself, writing scores for many ballets and motion pictures, as well as an opera, The Wind Remains (1943). He left the U.S. in the 1940s. His later career was that of an author and his works were generally set in Morocco, where he was expatriated for more than 50 years. His novels including The Sheltering Sky (1949), Let It Come Down (1952), and The Spider's House (1955) often deal with Occidentals in the Arab world, having as themes isolation, lovelessness, and the loss of tradition; Up Above the World (1966) deals with a couple in Central America. He issued A Little Stone (1950), Collected Stories (1979), A Delicate Episode (1988), and Unwelcome Words (1989) as volumes of short stories. The Thicket of Spring (1972) and Next to Nothing (1981) collect poems. Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue (1963) chronicles his journeys through Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, and Central American lands. A Life Full of Holes (1964) is a novel by an illiterate house servant in Morocco, tape recorded and translated from an Arabic dialect by Bowles, one of his many translations. Without Stopping (1972) is his autobiography, and Points in Time (1982) is a brief book evoking the Morocco where he long lived. In Touch, the Letters of Paul Bowles, covering a lifetime of correspondence, was published in 1994. He died in Tangier.

Bowles, Paul (1910–99), American writer, born in New York, who married Jane Auer (see above) in 1938. In 1948 they went to Tangier, where they lived intermittently for the rest of their lives, and where they became familiar landmarks in the expatriate gay community, and points of call for many literary visitors in search of the exotic. His works, most of which are set in Morocco, include The Sheltering Sky (1949), ‘an adventure story in which the adventures take place on two planes simultaneously: in the actual desert and in the inner desert of the spirit’; Let it Come Down (1952) about the disintegration of bank clerk Nelson Dyer in Tangier; The Spider's House (1955), set in Fez; and Up Above the World (1966), which follows a doomed American couple in central America. Without Stopping (1972) is an autobiography.