Novelist Paul Bowles Dies
U.S. novelist and composer Paul Bowles, best known for his novel The Sheltering Sky, died of a heart attack Thursday in the Moroccan city of Tangier. He was 88.
Bowles, who spent more than half his life in Morocco, wrote scores of volumes of prose, poetry, essays and letters. He studied music with American composer Aaron Copland, going on to produce a number of mostly orchestral pieces including the music for Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke.
A spokeswoman for the Italian Hospital in Tangier said, "Bowles died this morning after a heart attack, around midday."
A Moroccan official in Tangier said the writer's body was expected to be repatriated to the United States soon. U.S. embassy officials were not immediately available for comment.
Jamal Amiar, editor of Tangier-based Les Nouvelles du Nord, who was familiar with Bowles and his books, said the author was admitted to the hospital Monday.
"The writer's health slightly improved Wednesday... Several Moroccan writers visited him.... But suddenly he died," Amiar said.
Bowles was born in New York in 1910. His best-selling novel The Sheltering Sky told of alienated Americans searching for inspiration and romance in the Moroccan desert shortly after the Second World War.
Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci under the same title made the book into a film.
"He's been regarded as the first, and maybe the only, American existentialist," said a biographer, Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno.
"He was one of the first American writers to really zero in on man alienated from himself. Therefore, man retreats into a landscape. Where Bowles is really best is in dealing with man and landscape."
Bowles first visited Morocco in 1945 -- like many disillusioned American intellectuals in the wake of the Second World War -- and settled in the Mediterranean city of Tangier, which hosted other famous writers like Tennessee Williams and William Burroughs.
Among Bowles novels were The Delicate Prey (1950), Let It Come Down (1952), The Spider's House (1955) and Up Above The World (1966).
He also published collections of short stories, travel writing, poetry and an autobiography Without Stopping, which describes his meetings with many people pivotal to the Beat Generation.
He married writer Jane Auer (later Jane Bowles) in 1938. Theirs was an unorthodox marriage. Both were gay and had significant relationships with others during their marriage.
Jane Bowles died in Malaga, Spain, in 1973 in her mid-50s after many years of ill health.
Paul Bowles lived alone in the old city of Tangier and had few contacts with the outside world, refusing to have either a telephone or a fax machine installed at his home.