Paul Bowles

Who Was Paul Bowles?

Paul Bowles was one of the most singular American writers of the twentieth century — a composer, translator, and novelist who spent most of his adult life in Tangier, Morocco, and whose fiction explores the encounter between Western consciousness and the radical otherness of North African culture with a coldness and a precision that have no real parallel in American letters. Born in Jamaica, Queens, educated briefly at the University of Virginia, he studied composition with Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson and spent the 1930s as a successful composer before his wife Jane Bowles persuaded him to write fiction.

His first novel, The Sheltering Sky (1949), is a masterpiece of existential dread: the story of three Americans in the North African desert whose cultural assumptions are progressively stripped away by the landscape and the heat, until one of them is absorbed entirely into the alien culture and loses herself. The novel is one of the most sustained literary meditations on the fragility of Western identity and the void that lies beneath the surface of secular civilization.

Bowles spent the last half-century of his life in Tangier, recording and translating the oral literature of Moroccan storytellers, composing music, and writing with a detachment so complete that it approached nihilism. His work is significant for TLA as one of the most unsparing literary documentations of what the absence of transcendence looks like when it is fully inhabited.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• The Sheltering Sky — 1949 — novel
• Let It Come Down — 1952 — novel
• The Spider's House — 1955 — novel
• The Delicate Prey — 1950 — stories
• Without Stopping — 1972 — autobiography