Paul Frederick Bowles was brought up on the border of New York and Long Island. His father, Claude Bowles, was a successful dentist. His mother was Rena Bowles. He was an only child and exhibited early the existentialist's sense of alienation.

At the age of nine Paul Bowles wrote his first opera. When 18 he had his first work, Surreal Poetry, published in Eugene Jolas's Modernist magazine Transition in Paris.

For a short while he attended art college because he thought that he wanted to be a painter. He changed his mind and in 1928 he transferred to the University of Virginia, but in his first term he dropped out and moved to Paris where he worked on the switchboard of the International Herald Tribune. He studied in Paris with Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland and composed (1930s–40s) a number of modernist operas, ballets, song cycles, and orchestral and chamber pieces. Later he wrote music for the work of Tennessee Williams, a friend and supporter of the talents of both Paul and his wife Jane.

In his early creative years, prose interested him less than music. When Gertrude Stein told him he was "not a real poet," he agreed. At the time he only aspired to be a musician.

Paul Bowles went back to Paris and managed to get to know Jean Cocteau, André Gide, and Ezra Pound. He travelled to Berlin and met Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, and Jean Rhys.

In August 1931 Paul Bowles and Aaron Copland went to Morocco on the recommendation of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Paul Bowles and Aaron Copland took a house on the Mountain above Tangier Bay. Morocco was later to become the home of Paul Bowles, and the sparse landscape would inspire him to transform himself from being predominantly a composer into being predominantly a novelist.

In returning to New York he immersed himself in Marxist politics and in 1936 he set up the Committee on Republican Spain. He wrote the music for the play Who fights the Battle?, directed by Joseph Losey.

Paul Bowles wrote the opera Denmark Vesey, (1937), followed by The Wind Remains, (1941), with a libretto arranged from words by Federico García Lorca. Paul Bowles also wrote ballet music for Lincoln Kirstein's Yankee Clipper, (1937), and Sentimental Colloquy, choreographed by Salvador Dali. Paul Bowles also began to write music for Federal Theater Project 891, which was managed by Orson Welles. Paul Bowles also wrote the score for Orson Welles's production of Doctor Faustus.

In 1937, in E. E. Cummings's apartment in New York, Paul Bowles met the writer Jane Sidney Auer who was a committed lesbian. She was ill with tuberculosis of the bone and was looking for a man to take care of her. They married in February 1938 in Mexico and formed a lasting asexual, literary partnership. Paul Bowles continued to hover between celibacy and homosexuality while Jane Bowles continued to have a series of female lovers. Original and idiosyncratic, her works often treat the conflict between the weak and the strong. They include the novel Two Serious Ladies (1943) and a play, In the Summer House (1954). See The Collected Works of Jane Bowles (1978); A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles by M. Dillon (1981) or Out in the World: Selected Letters of Jane Bowles (1985), ed. by M. Dillon.

During the next two decades Paul Bowles composed music for over thirty Broadway plays, including The Glass Menagerie, (1945) and Sweet Bird of Youth, (1959). These were both written by Tennessee Williams who became a friend.

In 1947 the publishers Doubleday offered Paul Bowles an advance for a novel and he immediately arrange to travel to Morocco. He first gave his attention to his novel The Sheltering Sky which he had begun to plan while in New York. To be able to describe the hallucinatory moments of a lead character as he dies Paul Bowles wrote the section while under the influence of majoun, a cannabis confection.

Jane Bowles travelled to Tangier in January 1948. Paul and Jane Bowles became famous for the visitors that they attracted including Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Brion Gysin, and William S. Burroughs.

The Sheltering Sky was published in 1949 and made into a movie by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1990. The book received critical acclaim in Britain, and in November Paul Bowles accepted an invitation from John Lehmann to claim his laurels in London. In December 1949 Paul Bowles sailed alone from Antwerp for Ceylon (later called Sri Lanka). As the ship passed Tangier he felt homesick and was compelled to write. By the time the ship landed in Colombo he had completed the first chapter of Let It Come Down, a story of the psychic destruction of an unwary pilgrim who sought a new life in North Africa.

In 1950, his second novel, The Delicate Prey was published; in 1952, Let It Come Down; and in 1955, The Spider's House. His prolific writing career has continued with published collections of short stories, an autobiography (Without Stopping, 1972), which describes his meetings with many people pivotal to the Beat Generation), travel and poetry books, as well as translations, most notably the enigmatic tales of Moroccan Mohammed Mrabet (M'hashish, The Lemon).

Strongly individualistic, his fiction often traces the corruption of innocence and the psychic disintegration of “civilized man” in a savagely primitive environment. His works also include The Time of Friendship (1967), Collected Stories (1979), and Unwelcome Words (1988); and the novels Up Above the World (1966), and In the Red Room (1981). Bowles was also an accomplished travel writer, poet, and photographer.

On the personal front, Bowles considered himself a Romantic in the creative but not the sexual sense. He hated, for example, D.H. Lawrence's view of sex as magical, even religious. Sex and gender distinctions were interesting if irrelevent. Bowles believed that somewhere out there was a magic place or state of mind, a place that would deliver them into the ecstasy of personal revelation.

Jane Bowles died in 1973 after a series of mental breakdowns.

In 1998 the film Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles included scenes with Paul Bowles.

Paul Bowles died of a heart attack in a Tangier hospital on November 18, 1999.

Selected works:

• The Sheltering Sky (1947)
• Pages from Cold Point (1950)
• The Delicate Prey (1950)
• Let It Come Down (1952)
• Spider's House (1955)
• Up Above The World (1966)
• The Time of Friendship (1967)
• Without Stopping (1972). Autobiography.
• Collected Stories (1979)
• Unwelcome Words (1988)
• Love with a Few Hairs
• In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles
• A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard
• Days: Tangier Journal, 1987-1989
• Paul Bowles Photographs (1993)

Bibliography about Paul Bowles:

• Green, M. (1992). The Dream at the End of the World: Paul Bowles and the Literary Renegades in Tangier
• Sawyer-Lauçanno, C. (1989). An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles
• Miller, J. (ed.). (1994). In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles
• Caponi, G.D. (1993). Conversations with Paul Bowles

Links:

• The Authorized Paul Bowles Web Site
• A Paul Bowles Page (G.Kalsbeek)