The American writer and composer Paul Bowles was born the 30th of December 1910 just outside of New York. He used to talk about the life in New York with contempt and he begun to travel around the world quite early in his life.

He visited Tangier for the first time 1931. At the time he lived in Paris and the journey to Morocco was suggested and perhaps partly financed by Gertrude Stein. She did not regard Bowles to be a poet. In the autobiography Without Stopping he recalls the one occasion when she read his poems. "She sat back and thought a moment. Then she said: Well, the only trouble with all this is that it isnīt poetry." She found his images false; did not think much of his attempt to write in the surreal manner. Later she asked him if he had rewritten the poems when he answered no, she was triumphant and said: "You see! I told you, you were not a poet. A real poet, after one conversation would have gone upstairs and at least tried to recast them, but you havenīt even looked at them". Bowles stopped writing. He turned to music.

Paul Bowles studied music and composing between 1929-1945. He studied piano in the USA and Europe for Aaron Copeland and Virgil Thompson. Bowles wrote excellent pieces for ballet and orchestra. Most notably is the score for the Tennessee Williams play The Glass Menagerie. He also wrote the music score for a couple of Orson Wellsīs productions for the stage. Composers like Poulenc, Ravel and Satie inspired his music.

In 1945 Bowles returned to Morocco, tempted by the freedom in the White City of Tangier in northern Africa, like so many other disillusioned American intellectuals after World War 2. In 1948 he finally settled in Tangier with his wife, the novelist Jane Bowles. He lived a comfortable expatriate life as an American in Tangier.

Bowles wrote five novels, four collections of short stories, travel essays and poetry. In 1972 he wrote an autobiography Without Stopping which William S. Burroughs immediately renamed Without Telling since Bowles wrote a biography without telling the reader anything about himself.

The novel The Sheltering Sky from 1949 became his most famous work. It was filmed by Bertolucci in 1990. In contrast to most American writers, who is exploring the experience of being American, Bowles turned to the unexplored and unknown. He was constantly returning to two themes in his work: the meeting between persons with different cultural backgrounds and the psychological impact of these meetings. The meeting is often described from an Arabic perspective in a minimalist and almost impressionistic prose. Paul Bowles is observing rather than participating. The analysis is left to the reader. When Bowles describes a violent passage in a story, the distinct prose seem to be without any moral judgement, since he is describing a sequence of actions and ultimately the terror is created in the eye of the beholder.

The power of his distinct prose is apparent in two amazing short stories, The Delicate Prey and A Distant Episode. The sense of strangeness and terror in these two short stories are remarkably strong. The slicing off of the boyīs penis in The Delicate Prey is absolutely relentless as is the destiny of the American professor in A Distant Episode when he is captured by North African nomads, after his tongue is cut out, he is made into a clown, a toy. The terrors described is not unlike the darkness in the human heart that Cormac McCarthy recently has toured in his literary triptych The Border Trilogy. The important distinction between Bowles and McCarthy is that McCarthy sides for the young American boys in the sad and cruel ballad that takes place close to the Mexican border. Bowles never sides for anyone and that is one of the tricks that make his stories both so disturbing and intriguing. The reader is never home safe, so to speak.

One of Bowles many biographers, Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno has described Bowles as the first and perhaps even the only American existentialist. For me, Bowles was a great humanitarian with a sharp eye for the unexpected.

Paul Bowles died after a heart attack the 18 of November at the Italian Hospital in Tangier, Morocco. He was 88 years old. Bowles was brought to the Italian Hospital in Tangier on Tuesday the 16th and at noon on Thursday the 18th of November his heart stopped.