Paul Bowles

Paul Frederic Bowles, born December 30, 1910, in Jamaica, Queens, New York City, was an American composer, author, and translator whose work spanned Broadway, concert music, fiction, and literary translation. The only child of Rena Winnewisser and Claude Dietz Bowles, a dentist, he died on November 18, 1999, at the age of 88. His ashes are interred near family graves at Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.

Bowles demonstrated exceptional aptitude from an early age, reading by age three and writing stories by four. His mother read Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe to him, and he later credited Poe as an influence on his own fiction. Musical interest developed during childhood as well, spurred by a phonograph and classical records his father purchased. The family acquired a piano, and Bowles studied musical theory, singing, and piano. At fifteen, attending a performance of Stravinsky's The Firebird at Carnegie Hall made a lasting impression on him. He attended Jamaica High School in Queens before enrolling at the University of Virginia in 1928, where his interests included T. S. Eliot, Prokofiev, Duke Ellington, Gregorian chant, and blues. In April 1929, he left without notifying his parents and sailed to Paris on a one-way ticket, spending time working for the Paris Herald Tribune and forming a friendship with Romanian poet Tristan Tzara.

Returning to New York, Bowles studied composition with Aaron Copland, who was both mentor and lover to him. Bowles later described Copland as, other than his wife Jane, the most important person in his life; when their affair ended, they remained lifelong friends. He returned to the University of Virginia briefly before leaving again for Paris with Copland. During the autumn of 1930 in Paris, Bowles began his Sonata for Oboe and Clarinet, completing it the following year. It premiered on December 16, 1931, at Aeolian Hall in New York, on a program that also included works by Copland and Virgil Thomson. In Paris, Bowles became part of Gertrude Stein's literary and artistic circle, and on her advice made his first visit to Tangier with Copland in the summer of 1931.

Back in New York by 1937, Bowles built a substantial reputation as a theatrical composer over the following decade, collaborating with figures including Orson Welles and Tennessee Williams. His Broadway credits include My Heart's in the Highlands, Liberty Jones, Land's End, On Whitman Avenue, and In the Summer House. He also worked as a music critic at the New York Herald Tribune under Virgil Thomson. His zarzuela The Wind Remains, based on a poem by Federico García Lorca, was performed in 1943 with choreography by Merce Cunningham and conducted by Leonard Bernstein. That same year, his translation of Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis Clos, directed by John Huston, received a Drama Critic's Award.

In 1938, Bowles married Jane Auer, an author and playwright. The couple were prominent among New York literary figures throughout the 1940s and briefly lived at February House in late 1939. In 1947, having received a novel contract from Doubleday, Bowles used the advance to relocate permanently to Tangier, at that time part of the Tangier International Zone. Jane followed in 1948. His first novel, The Sheltering Sky, published in 1949 and set in French North Africa, achieved both critical and popular success. Except for winters spent in Ceylon during the early 1950s, Tangier remained his home for the rest of his life, a span of 52 years, and he came to be closely identified with the city.