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Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999), was an American composer, author, and traveler.

Childhood and youth

Bowles was born in Jamaica, Queens, New York City to Rena (née Rennewisser) and Claude Dietz Bowles, where his father was a dentist, and spent his childhood at 108 Hardenbrook Avenue, then 207 De Grauw Avenue, and later 34 Terrace Avenue. His mother read Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe to him as a child, and Bowles made notebooks of writing and drawing throughout his childhood. When Bowles was 8, his father bought a phonograph and classic records; Bowles was interested in jazz but such records were forbidden in the house. About this time his family bought a piano and Bowles studied theory, singing, and piano. He continued to keep a diary of imaginary goings-on during this time, and also wrote a daily newspaper. In 1922, at age 11, Bowles bought his first book of poetry, Arthur Waley's A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems. In high school he attended a performance of Stravinsky's Firebird at Carnegie Hall which made a profound impression.

Bowles entered the University of Virginia in 1928, where his interests included T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Prokofiev, Duke Ellington, Gregorian chants, and the blues, and he published two items in transition. He also heard music by George Antheil and Henry Cowell. In April 1929 he dropped out of school to make his first trip to Paris where he worked as a switchboard operator for the Herald Tribune. He returned home in July and started writing Without Stopping, his first mature book. He left college without a degree in 1930.

France and New York

On a subsequent trip to France in 1931, he became a part of Gertrude Stein's literary and artistic circle and on her advice, that summer he made his first visit to Tangier with his friend and music teacher the composer Aaron Copland. In Berlin, he met Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood, who gives the name Bowles to the heroine of Goodbye to Berlin. The following year he returned to North Africa and traveled throughout other parts of Morocco, the Sahara and Algeria. Throughout the next decade, Bowles composed a good body of music including sonatas, song cycles, and music for stage productions (including Doctor Faustus directed by Orson Welles, the orchestration for George Balanchine's Yankee Clipper at Lincoln Kirstein's request), and also made early recordings of North African music.

In 1938 he married author and playwright Jane Auer (Feb. 22, 1917 - May 4, 1973), and after a brief sojourn in France they were prominent among the literary figures of New York throughout the 1940s, with Paul working under Virgil Thomson as a music critic at the New York Herald Tribune. His light opera The Wind Remains, based on a poem by Garcia Lorca, was performed in 1943 with choreography by Merce Cunningham and conducted by Leonard Bernstein. In 1945 he unexpectedly began writing prose again, beginning with a few short stories including A Distant Episode. He also translated Jorge Luis Borges at this time, and his translation of the play No Exit (entitled Huis-clos in French) by Jean-Paul Sartre, directed by John Huston, won a Drama Critic's Award. The subsequent year, he received an advance for a novel, and began writing The Sheltering Sky, which quickly rose to the New York Times best-seller list when published by New Directions.

Tangier and elsewhere

Also in 1947, he moved permanently to Tangier, and his wife Jane followed him there in 1948. The Bowleses became iconoclasts of the Tangerinos—American and European expatriates centered in Tangier. During the following decade Bowles wrote much of his most famous prose. Prominent literary friends visited Paul and Jane Bowles in Tangier beginning in the late 1940s, including Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal. The Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs followed in the mid-1950s. In Morocco, Bowles concentrated on writing novels, short stories and travel pieces, and wrote 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), where he wrote much of his novel The Spider's House, returning to Tangier in the warmer months.

In 1961, Bowles began tape-recording and translating works of Moroccan authors and story-tellers, including stories by long-time friend Ahmed Yacoubi, Larbi Layachi (under the pseudonym Driss ben Hamed Charhadi), and Mohammed Mrabet. Rather oddly, Bowles spent one term at the English Department of the San Fernando Valley State College, (now California State University, Northridge) in 1968, teaching existentialism and the novel. Most of the time, however, he remained in Tangier with brief interludes elsewhere overseas.

Later years

After the death of Jane Bowles in 1973 in Malaga, Spain, Bowles continued to live in Tangier, writing and receiving visitors to his modest apartment. In 1995 Paul Bowles made a rare and final return to New York for a festival of his music at the Lincoln Center and a symposium and interview held at the New School for Social Research.

Paul Bowles died of heart failure at the Italian Hospital in Tangier on November 18, 1999 at the age of 88. The following day a full-page obituary appeared in The New York Times. Although he had lived in Morocco for 52 years, he was buried in Lakemont, New York, next to the graves of his parents and grandparents.

Selected works

Besides being a composer and novelist, Bowles published fourteen short story collections, three volumes of poetry, numerous translations, and books of travel writing and autobiography. Some of his better-known works are listed below.

Music

• 1931 Sonata for Oboe and Clarinet
• 1937 Yankee Clipper, ballet
• 1941 Pastorela, ballet
• 1944 The Glass Managerie, play
• 1946 Cabin, words by Tennessee Williams, music by Paul Bowles
• 1946 Concerto for Two Pianos
• 1947 Sonata for Two Pianos
• 1949 Night Waltz
• 1953 A Picnic Cantata
• 1955 Yerma, opera
• 1979 Blue Mountain ballads, words by Tennessee Williams, music by Paul Bowles.

Novels

• 1949 The Sheltering Sky
• 1952 Let It Come Down
• 1955 The Spider's House
• 1966 Up Above the World

Collections of short stories

• 1950 A Little Stone
• 1950 The delicate prey, and other stories
• 1959 The Hours after Noon
• 1962 A hundred camels in the courtyard
• 1967 The Time of Friendship
• 1968 Pages from Cold Point and Other Stories
• 1975 Three Tales
• 1977 Things Gone & Things Still Here
• 1979 Collected stories, 1939-1976
• 1988 Unwelcome Words: Seven Stories

Poetry

• 1933 Two Poems
• 1968 Scenes
• 1972 The Thicket of Spring
• 1981 Next to nothing: collected poems, 1926-1977

Translations

Among his life's accomplishments were translations of stories from the oral tradition of native Moroccan storytellers including Mohammed Mrabet, Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi (Larbi Layachi), Abdeslam Boulaich, and Ahmed Yacoubi. He also translated the Moroccan author Mohamed Choukri. Bowles spent five weeks in 1959 recording 'andaluz' as well as traditional Berber tribal music while traveling around Morocco. Two recordings have been commercially released and all are archived in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

• 1964 A Life Full Of Holes, by Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi (Larbi Layachi)
• 1968 Love With A Few Hairs, by Mohammed Mrabet
• 1968 The Lemon, by Mohammed Mrabet
• 1970 M'Hashish, by Mohammed Mrabet
• 1974 The Boy Who Set the Fire, by Mohammed Mrabet
• 1976 Look & Move On, by Mohammed Mrabet
• 1976 Harmless Poisons, Blameless Sins, by Mohammed Mrabet
• 1979 Five Eyes, by Abdeslam Boulaich, Mohamed Choukri, Larbi Layachi, Mohammed Mrabet, and Ahmed Yacoubi

Travel writing and autobiography

• 1957 Yallah, text by Paul Bowles, photos by Peter W. Haeberlin
• 1963 Their Heads are Green, travel writing
• 1972 Without stopping; an autobiography

In 1990 Bernardo Bertolucci adapted The Sheltering Sky into a film in which Bowles plays the narrative voice.

External links

• After his death, the literary and musical heirs of the estate of Paul and Jane Bowles established the official site, The Authorized Paul Bowles Web Site, which contains accurate and comprehensive information for writer and playwright Jane Bowles and writer and composer Paul Bowles, including recommended resources, biographies and bibliographies. The international academic author society for both Paul and Jane Bowles is The Jane and Paul Bowles Society which conducts panel discussions at literary conferences and publishes Bowles Notes.

• Paul Bowles Collection, Harry Ransom Center

• 1910 births
• 1999 deaths
• American composers
• American novelists
• Bisexual writers
• 20th century classical composers