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This title in other formats:Paul Bowles: A Lifeby Virginia Spenc Carr
Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:Paul Bowles — novelist, composer, expatriate, rebel, and bisexual — is one of the most compelling and mythologized figures in twentieth-century American culture. Born in 1910, Bowles grew up in Jamaica, New York, a precocious child who could read by the age of three and was writing stories within the year. At eighteen, he embarked on an artistic journey that led him all over the world. Remarkably gifted, Bowles entered the vibrant art and literary world of the late 1920s and early '30s as a poet and composer. He studied music with composer Aaron Copland and was a friend of Gertrude Stein, W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Ned Rorem, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Stephen Spender, and Christopher Isherwood (who named his character Sally Bowles after him). Over the course of his career he composed scores for films and innumerable plays, including many works by Tennessee Williams and Orson Welles. It wasn't until after he married Jane Auer that he began writing fiction: The Delicate Prey, The Spider's House, Let It Come Down, and The Sheltering Sky, which he wrote after moving to Tangier in 1947, and which was immediately hailed as a classic. It is Bowles's flamboyant life that most fascinates people — his friendships, his appetites, his controversial marriage, his leftist politics, his voluntary exile to Morocco, and his stature as a countercultural and gay icon. Through ten years of research, thirteen trips to Bowles's home in Tangier, extensive interviews with some two hundred of Bowles's acquaintances, and her own intimate relationship with Bowles, who died in 1999, Virginia Spencer Carr has gathered a wealth of information about Bowles and has written a masterful, riveting, and definitive account of an extraordinary life. Review:Rex Reed Riveting. Paul Bowles, the man and the writer, emerges complete, with every darkness illuminated. Review:Fred Kaplan, author of The Singular Mark Twain; Gore Vidal: A Biography; Dickens: A Biography; and Henry James, The Imagination of Genius: A Biography How lucky Paul Bowles was to have such a devoted and talented friend and biographer as Virginia Spencer Carr, who now brings us the first biography of the whole life. She illumines many of the private and mysterious corners of Bowles's complicated relationships and secretive personality. She gives life and depth to the intricacies of his marriage and his affairs, to his passive individuality and his literary originality. Beyond it all, he is still an enigma, unexplainable, far from fully likable, but always fascinating in this portrait of one of our most exotically modern literary and musical geniuses. Review:John Hopkins, author of The Tangier Diaries, 1962-1979 and All I Wanted Was Company Impressive and moving, a fantastic tale of focused literary and musical creation. Review:Ned Rorem, composer, President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and author of Lies: A Diary, 1986-1999 and A Ned Rorem Reader Paul Bowles is the most intriguing modern American male artist....By far, the most readable account. Paul Bowles lives in the pages. Synopsis:An acclaimed biographer with unsurpassed personal access to Paul Bowles (1910-2001) and to his friends and his archive pens this revelatory biography of the writer of the 1949 autobiographical bestselling novel "The Sheltering Sky."
Table of ContentsContents A Few Words Before Chapter One: The Early Childhood of Paul Bowles (1910-1918) Chapter Two: Bowles's Move to a New Neighborhood and His Discovery of the Arts (1917-1927) Chapter Three: Paul Bowles, a Runaway to Paris (1928-1931) Chapter Four: Bowles's Return to Europe (1931-1933) Chapter Five: A Lovesick Bowles in Algeria. Disillusionment, Estrangement, and Success in New York (1933-1936) Chapter Six: Paul Bowles Meets Jane Auer. They Fall in Love and Marry (1937-1940) Chapter Seven: Paul and Jane in Acapulco, Where They Meet Tennessee Williams (1940-1943) Chapter Eight: Writing Music Reviews, Music for Broadway, Fiction, and Translations (1943-1947) Chapter Nine: Bowles's Departure for Morocco and Return to New York to Compose Music for A Streetcar Named Desire and Summer and Smoke (1947-1948) Chapter Ten: Bowles Returns to the Desert with Jane, and They Renew Their Dedication to Writing (1949-1951) Chapter Eleven: Mishaps, Chance, Intervention of Fate, and Jane's Elusive Third Act of In the Summer House (1952-1954) Chapter Twelve: Burroughs in Tangier and Bowles's Several Visits to His Island Off Ceylon (1954-1959) Chapter Thirteen: Bowles Records Indigenous Music, Translates, and Survives As Best He Can (1959-1966) Chapter Fourteen: Six Years of Abject Sadness (1967-1973) Chapter Fifteen: Without Jane (1973-1999) Chapter Sixteen: Coda Additional Acknowledgments Chronology Notes Index
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