Bowles, Paul

(US, 1910–99)

Born in New York, Bowles began his career as a successful composer, studying under Aaron Copland. In 1947 he and his writer wife Jane settled in Tangiers where Bowles himself began writing. The Sheltering Sky (1949), an immediate best-seller later made into a film (Bertolucci, 1990), follows the hallucinatory journey of Kit and Port Moresby as they travel to North Africa seeking adventure and new experiences. Instead, they are forced to confront their own inner turmoil in the desolate landscape. In Let it Come Down (1952) Nelson Dyer gives up his banking job in the United States and travels to Tangiers where he finds himself catapulted into a grim world of drugs, murder, and psychological breakdown.

Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs  EW