Bowles, Paul (1910–1999)

US writer and composer. Born in New York City, he studied music composition with Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, writing scores for ballets, films, and an opera, The Wind Remains (1943), as well as incidental music for plays. He settled in Morocco, the setting of his novels The Sheltering Sky (1949, filmed 1990) and Let It Come Down (1952), which chillingly depict the existential breakdown of Westerners unable to survive self-exposure in an alien culture. Other works include A Thousand Days for Mokhtar (1989) and Too Far from Home (1994). His autobiography, Without Stopping, was published in 1972.

Bowles settled permanently in Tangier with his wife, the writer Jane Bowles (1917–1973), after World War II and became greatly influenced by Moroccan storytelling – he later turned to transcribing and translating tales by Muhammad Mrabet and others.