UNITED STATES AUTHOR · FICTION · GENERAL
Paul Bowles
Also known as: Bowles, Paul, Paul. Bowles
Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 – November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. He became associated with Tangier, where he settled in 1947 and lived for 52 years to the end of his life. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making several trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with his first novel The Sheltering Sky (1949), set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, at that time in the Tangier International Zone, and his wife Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was Bowles' home for the remainder of his life. He came to symbolize American immigrants in the city. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried near family graves in Lakemont Cemetery, in upstate New York.
In April 1601 the English East India Company sent its first expedition to the East Indies.
— from Capitalism
Most acclaimed
Travels
1958
Here is a record of Michael Crichton's astonishing adventures. It is a vision of travel not as escape but as exhilaration, as a testing of self, and as spiritual education. Crichton shows us travel as turmoil and as peace. All of this voyages, outward and inward, from his twenties to his mid-forties, have been journeys into awareness--leading him to the excitement and benison of direct expeirence undimmed by expectations, theories, or old assumptions. His remarkable book is in itself a fascinating realm in which the adventurous are invited to travel.
Open city
"A magic decade of Italian writing followed the fall of Mussolini's Fascists and the liberation of Rome in 1944. Ignazio Silone, author of one of the great novels of the 1930s, Bread and Wine, returned from exile. Alberto Moravia, who helped define the modern conscience with his novel, The Time of Indifference, left the mountains outside Rome where he had been hiding from the Germans. Rome filled with veterans of the partisan war, of the underground, of the anonymity and silence of the Italian police state. The suffering of the war, the bold hopes which blossomed after Fascism's overthrow, were described in a torrent of films, stories and novels, bringing a kind of climax to one of the great national literatures of the twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET. "American William Weaver also arrived in Rome in the late 1940s. Open City is an anthology of the writers Weaver admired most, and they all come to life in the pages of his long introductory memoir."--BOOK JACKET.