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Jane Bowles, born Jane Auer, (February 22, 1917, died May 4, 1973) was an American writer and playwright.
Born into a Jewish family in New York, Jane Bowles spent her childhood in Woodmere, Long Island. She developed tubuclosis of the knee as a teenager and her mother took her for treatment in Switzerland, where she attended boarding school. After she returned to New York where she gravitated to the intellectual bohemia of Greenwich Village as a teenager and began to sexually experiment with people of both sexes.
Yet she married writer and composer Paul Bowles in 1938. In 1943 her novel Two Serious Ladies was published. The Bowleses lived mostly in New York until in 1948 when she moved to Tangier, Morocco to be with her husband who moved there in late 1947. She also wrote the play In The Summer House which was performed on Broadway in 1953 to mixed reviews. Tennessee Williams and John Ashbery considered Jane Bowles one of the finest and most underrated writers of American fiction.
A heavy drinker, Jane Bowles suffered a stroke at age 40 in 1957. Her health continued to decline, despite various treatments in England and the United States, until she had to be admitted to a Spanish hospital in Málaga, Spain, where she died in 1973.
The protagonists in Paul Bowles' first novel, The Sheltering Sky are based on him and Jane.
External links
- The Authorized Paul Bowles Web Site The estate of Paul and Jane Bowles has established an official site which serves as the official Jane Bowles site.
- The Jane and Paul Bowles Society is the author society for writer and playwright Jane Bowles and writer and composer Paul Bowles, which presents academic panels at literary conferences internationlly and which publishes the literary journal Bowles Notes.