American · b. 1910
American composer and novelist who spent most of his adult life in Tangier, Morocco, and whose fiction explored Western characters losing themselves in the alien landscapes of North Africa.
Paul Bowles was born in Jamaica, New York in 1910. He studied composition with Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, and had a successful career as a composer of concert music, film scores, and theatrical works before turning to fiction in his late thirties. His wife, Jane Bowles, was a novelist and playwright who moved in overlapping literary circles.
In 1947 Bowles moved to Tangier, Morocco — then an international zone attracting writers, artists, and intellectuals — and lived there until his death in 1999. The Sheltering Sky (1949) was his first novel, and it established him as a major literary voice. The Bowles’ Tangier house became a gathering point for Beat Generation writers including William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac.
Bowles’s fiction is characterised by its detached, almost clinical observation of characters undone by place — particularly Western characters who venture into North Africa or Latin America and lose their grip on identity. His translations of Moroccan oral literature and storytelling also constituted a significant part of his literary legacy. He died in Tangier in 1999.
by Paul Bowles
Bowles's first and most celebrated short story collection — tales of North Africa, Central America, and the American South that share a preoccupation with violence, dissolution, and the encounter between Western consciousness and alien cultures.
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by Paul Bowles
In Fez during the last days of French Morocco in 1954, an American writer and a Moroccan boy encounter each other against the backdrop of the independence movement. Bowles's most politically engaged novel.
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by Paul Bowles
Nelson Dyar, a bored New York bank teller, moves to Tangier hoping to escape his life — and descends into a world of currency smugglers, drug dealers, and nihilistic expatriates that ends in catastrophe.
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by Paul Bowles
Three American expatriates travel through North Africa after World War II — and the desert progressively unmakes them, exposing what lies beneath their identity, their marriage, and their sense of self.
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All Paul Bowles novels and story collections in order — from The Sheltering Sky to The Spider's House. Complete guide to the American expatriate writer's dark fiction set in Morocco.
guide
New to Paul Bowles? The Sheltering Sky is the right starting point — but this guide explains what to expect from his cold, dark fiction and which book suits different types of reader.
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