Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 – November 18, 1999) was an American composer and writer. From 1947 to the end of his life, he lived in Tangier, Morrocco.
Paul Bowles | |
|---|---|
| Born | Paul Frederic Bowles December 30, 1910 Jamaica, Queens, New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Died | November 18, 1999 (aged 88) Tangier, Morrocco |
| Occupation | Novelist, composer |
| Period | 20th Century |
| Notable works | The Sheltering Sky (1949) 'A Distant Episode" (1947) |
| Notable awards | Rea Award for the Short Story |
| Spouse | Jane Bowles |
Bowles started college at the University of Virginia. He soon left it and went to Paris. He met Gertude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. When he returned to the United States, he started to study music with Aaron Copland. In 1931, Stein and Toklas told them to move to Morrocco. And they did.[1] Bowles wrote his first chamber and solo piano works there. Later he went to Guatemala, Mexico, Ceylon, southern India and the Sahara. The music in those places had an influence on his own music.[2]
In 1938 he married the writer Jane Auer. She was a lesbian, and he was bisexual. It was not an ordinary marriage.[1] They moved to Morrocco in 1948. After that move, Bowles wrote less music and more fiction.[3]
His novels and short stories are often about Americans who come to North Africa to get away from the technology and noise of modern life. Things go wrong for them in the different culture.[4]
Bowles died of a heart attack in a hospital in Tangier.[1] He is buried with his wife, Jane, in Lakemont, New York.[5]
- The Sheltering Sky (1949)
- The Delicate Prey and Other Stories (1950)
- Let It Come Down (1952)
- The Spider's House (1955)
- Up Above the World (1966)
- Without Stopping (autobiography) (1972)
- Two Years Beside The Strait (autobiography) (1990)
- Days: Tangier Journal (autobiography) (1991)
- Collected Stories, 1939–1976 (1979)
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