Bowles, Paul, 1910–1999.

Miller, Jeffrey. Paul Bowles: A Descriptive Bibliography. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1986. Morrow, Bradford and Seamus Cooney. A Bibliography of the Black Sparrow Press, 1966–1978. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1981. Sawyer-Lauçanno, Christopher. An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989.

Paul Frederic Bowles was born in New York City on December 30, 1910. Since the 1940s, Bowles has written numerous works of fiction, essays, translations, travel writing, poems, and other works. Among Bowles’s best-known fictional works are the novels The Sheltering Sky (1949), Let It Come Down (1952), The Spider’s House (1955); and his initial short story collection, The Delicate Prey and Other Stories (1950).

Paul Bowles has also had a prominent career as a composer. He studied with both Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, and during the 1930s and 1940s became one of the pre-eminent composers of American theater music.

In 1938, Paul Bowles married the former Jane Auer, who, under her married name, became an accomplished author. Paul and Jane Bowles spent much of their married life traveling throughout the world and in the late 1940s made Tangier, Morocco, their permanent home. Jane Bowles died in 1973, but Bowles has continued to reside in Tangier.

John Martin is the publisher of Black Sparrow Press, which is noted for its publication of the works of contemporary poets and writers. Black Sparrow Press began publishing in 1966 with a broadside of Charles Bukowski’s poem “True Story.” In addition to publishing most of the poetry written by Charles Bukowski, over the years John Martin has published the work of such writers as Diane Wakoski, Tom Clark, John Ashbery, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, James Purdy, Joyce Carol Oates, Wyndham Lewis, Robert Creeley, William Everson, and numerous others. John Martin has published the work of both Jane and Paul Bowles, as well as Bowles’ translations of the work of Mohammed Mrabet. The works of Bowles which bear Black Sparrow Press’s imprint include Scenes (1968), The Thicket of Spring: poems, 1926–1969 (1972), The Boy Who Set the Fire and Other Stories (1974), Things Gone and Things Still Here (1977), Collected Stories, 1939–1976 (1979), Five Eyes (1979), Next to Nothing: collected poems, 1926–1977 (1981), Midnight Mass (1981), and a reprint in 1982 of the Spider’s House . Black Sparrow Press also published Bowles’ translation to English of Mohammed Mrabet’s Look and Move On (1976), Harmless Poisons (1976), and The Big Mirror (1977).

From the guide to the Paul Bowles letters to John Martin, 1975–1990, (University of Delaware Library - Special Collections)