(In this classic work of psychological terror, Paul Bowles...)
In this classic work of psychological terror, Paul Bowles examines the ways in which Americans apprehend an alien culture—and the ways in which their incomprehension destroys them. The story of three American travelers adrift in the cities and deserts of North Africa after World War II, The Sheltering Sky is at once merciless and heartbreaking in its compassion.
(Exemplary storles that reveal the blzarre, the dlsturblng...)
Exemplary storles that reveal the blzarre, the dlsturblng, the perllous, and the wlse ln other clvlllzatlons -- from one of Amerlca's most lmportant wrlters of the twentleth century.
(In Let It Come Down, Paul Bowles plots the doomed traject...)
In Let It Come Down, Paul Bowles plots the doomed trajectory of Nelson Dyar, a New York bank teller who comes to Tangier in search of a different life and ends up giving in to his darkest impulses. Rich in descriptions of the corruption and decadence of the International Zone in the last days before Moroccan independence, Bowles's second novel is an alternately comic and horrific account of a descent into nihilism.
Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue: Scenes from the Non-Christian World
(Their Heads are Green and their Hands are Blue is an enga...)
Their Heads are Green and their Hands are Blue is an engaging collection of eight travel essays. These essays provide us with Paul Bowles' characteristic insightfulness and bring us closer to a world we frequently hear about, but often find difficult to understand.
(Paul Bowles, the acclalmed author of The Shelterlng Sky, ...)
Paul Bowles, the acclalmed author of The Shelterlng Sky, offers movlng, powerful, subtle, and fasclnatlng lnslghts lnto hls llfe, hls wrltlng, and hls world.
(In this book, Paul Bowles leads the reader beneath the su...)
In this book, Paul Bowles leads the reader beneath the surface of hospitality and luxury into a tortuous maze of human relationships and shifting moods, until what seems at first a merely casual encounter is seen to be one rooted in viciousness and horror.
(A Distant Episode contains the best of Paul Bowles's shor...)
A Distant Episode contains the best of Paul Bowles's short stories, as selected by the author. An American cult figure, Bowles has fascinated such disparate talents as Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Truman Capote, William S. Burroughs, Gore Vidal, and Jay McInerney.
Paul Frederic Bowles was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. He composed music for films, operas, and ballets. Bowles wrote such books as The Sheltering Sky, The Spider's House, Up Above the World.
Background
Paul Frederic Bowles was born on December 30, 1910, in New York City. He was the only child of Rena (née Winnewisser) and Claude Dietz Bowles.
Paul had materially comfortable childhood, with the warmth provided by his mother. However, his father was a cold and estranged parent.
Education
Bowles could read at the age of 3 and write stories at the age of 4. He was interested in music as well, so young Bowles studied musical theory, singing, and piano. When he was 15, he attended a performance of Stravinsky's The Firebird at Carnegie Hall, which impressed him a lot.
Bowles entered the University of Virginia in 1928. However, in April 1929, he dropped out without informing his parents and sailed with a one-way ticket for Paris and no intention of returning. A few months later he returned to New York at the insistence of his parents. Bowles resumed his studies at the University of Virginia but left after one semester to return to Paris with Aaron Copland, with whom he had been studying composition in New York.
In spring 1929 Paul Bowles went to Paris where he worked for the Paris Herald Tribune. However, he soon returned to New York and worked at Duttons Bookshop in Manhattan, where he began to work on an unfinished book of fiction, Without Stopping. During the autumn of 1930 in Paris Bowles began work on his own first musical composition, the Sonata for Oboe and Clarinet, which he finished the following year. It premiered in New York at the Aeolian Hall on Wigmore Street, 16 December 1931. Bowles also became a part of Gertrude Stein's literary and artistic circle. On her advice, he made his first visit to Tangier with Aaron Copland in the summer of 1931. He also visited Morocco, the Sahara, Algeria, and Tunisia.
In 1937, Bowles returned to New York. Over the next decade, he established a solid reputation as a composer, collaborating with Orson Welles, Tennessee Williams, and others on music for stage productions, as well as orchestral pieces. Paul Bowles also worked under Virgil Thomson, as a music critic at the New York Herald Tribune. His light opera The Wind Remains, based on a poem by Federico García Lorca, was performed in 1943 with choreography by Merce Cunningham and conducted by Leonard Bernstein. His translation of Jean-Paul Sartre's play Huis Clos ("No Exit"), directed by John Huston, won a Drama Critic's Award in 1943. In 1945, Bowles began writing prose again, beginning with a few short stories including "A Distant Episode".
In 1947, Paul Bowles received a contract for a novel from Doubleday; with the advance, he moved permanently to Tangier. Bowles traveled alone into the Algerian Sahara to work on the novel. He titled the novel The Sheltering Sky, from a song, "Down Among the Sheltering Palms", which he had heard every summer as a child. It was first published by John Lehmann in England, in September 1949. Later he published his first collection of short stories. He wrote his second and the third novel at Tangier. While Bowles was concentrating on his career as a writer, he composed incidental music for nine plays presented by the American School of Tangier. In 1952, Bowles bought the tiny island of Taprobane, off the coast of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). There, he wrote much of his novel The Spider's House and returned to Tangier in the warmer months.
From 1959 - 1961, Bowles recorded a wide variety of music from the different ethnic groups in Morocco, including the Sephardic Jewish communities of Meknes and Essaouira. Bowles also worked at translating Moroccan authors and story-tellers, including Mohamed Choukri, Ahmed Yacoubi, Larbi Layachi, and Mohammed Mrabet. In the autumn of 1968, invited by friend Oliver Evans, Bowles was a visiting scholar for one semester at the English Department of the San Fernando Valley State College. In 1970, Bowles and Daniel Halpern founded the literary magazine Antaeus, which was based in Tangier. It featured many new writers as well as established authors. Bowles's work was also represented, including his story "Afternoon with Antaeus." Antaeus was published until 1994.
In 1982 Bowles published Points in Time, subtitled Tales From Morocco, a collection of stories. Divided into eleven parts, the work consists of untitled story fragments, anecdotes, and travel narratives. In 1985, Bowles published his translation of Jorge Luis Borges' short story, "The Circular Ruins". Bowles had a cameo appearance at the beginning and end of the film version of The Sheltering Sky (1990), directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Bowles' music was overlooked and mostly forgotten for more than a generation, but in the 1990s, a new generation of American musicians and singers became interested in his work again.
In 1995, Bowles made his final return to New York, invited to a "Paul Bowles Festival" at Lincoln Center celebrating his music; it was performed by Jonathan Sheffer leading the Eos Orchestra. The total collection of this recorded music is known as The Paul Bowles Collection; it is archived in the US Library of Congress, Reference No. 72-750123. The Archival Manuscript Material (Collection) contains 97 x 2-track 7" reel-to-reel tapes, containing approximately sixty hours of traditional folk, art and popular music, one box of manuscripts, 18 photographs, and a map, along with the 2-LP recording called Music of Morocco (AFS L63-64).
Bowles died of heart failure on November 18, 1999, at the Italian Hospital in Tangier, aged 88. He had been ill for some time with respiratory problems.
"Paul Bowles is a storyteller of the utmost purity and integrity. He writes of a world before God became man; a world in which men and women in extremis are seen as components in a larger, more elemental drama. His prose is crystalline and his voice unique. Among living American masters of the short story, Paul Bowles is sui generis."
Interests
Writers
Edgar Allan Poe
Music & Bands
Blues, Igor Stravinsky, Duke Ellington
Connections
In 1938, Paul Bowles married Jane Auer, an author and playwright. It was an unconventional marriage; each of their intimate relationships were with people of their own sex, but the couple maintained close personal ties with each other.
Conversations With Paul Bowles
For the past forty years Paul Bowles has answered questions about the autobiographical references in his novels (The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider's House, and Up Above the World) and about his work as a composer in New York, all the time insisting, "I don't want anyone to know about me." Yet in this collection of interviews dating from 1952 to the present, Bowles gives a variety of answers that reveal as much as they conceal.
1993
An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles
This biography of self-exiled composer/novelist Paul Bowles explores his tormented childhod, his marriage to novelist Jane Bowles, and his acknowledged role as the spiritual father of the Beat movement and the eminence grise of the American expatriate community in Tangiers
1989
You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles
The famously enigmatic writer-composer Paul Bowles is the subject of Millicent Dillon's unforgettable new book. Her portrait of the chameleonlike artist is much more than an account of Bowles's life, however. It is also a meditation on biography that questions the biographer's role, the subject's credibility, and the very nature of "truth" in the telling of a life.
Paul Bowles Magic and Morocco
This concise book examines the interaction between earlier and other writers, painters (and anthropologists) and Morocco, and then examines the effects of this culture and its magical practices upon the person, psyche and writings of Paul Bowles.