Paul Bowles

American · 1910 to 1999

Paul Bowles was born on December 30, 1910, in Jamaica, Queens, in a house so exacting that family legend held his father once left him on an open window ledge during a snowstorm as an infant, and Bowles said in later years that the story captured everything about the man. He could read by three and was writing his own stories by four, but he did not settle into music or fiction until his twenties. He entered the University of Virginia in 1928 and left within a year, sailing for Paris instead, where he fell in with Gertrude Stein's circle and, on her advice, first visited Tangier, Morocco, in 1931. He studied composition under Aaron Copland and spent the 1930s and 1940s as a working composer in New York, writing incidental music for Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie and Summer and Smoke among other Broadway productions. In 1938 he married the writer Jane Auer; their marriage was unconventional, both pursuing relationships with their own sex while remaining devoted to each other until her death in 1973. Bowles settled permanently in Tangier in 1947, and two years later published The Sheltering Sky, the novel that made his name and set the pattern for the rest of his fiction: Americans undone by landscapes too vast for the selves they arrived with. He went on to write Let It Come Down and The Spider's House, translated Moroccan storytellers including Mohammed Mrabet and Mohamed Choukri into English, and between 1959 and 1961 crossed Morocco with a tape recorder for the Library of Congress, preserving traditional music that might otherwise have been lost. He remained in Tangier for the rest of his life, a fixed point for decades of visiting writers, and died there of heart failure on November 18, 1999, at eighty-eight.