American · 1910–1999
Paul Bowles left America for Tangier and never came back. "The Sheltering Sky" (1949) follows an American couple into the Sahara where civilization dissolves and something else takes over. Bowles was a composer before he was a novelist; his fiction has a composer's attention to atmosphere and rhythm. He lived in Morocco for over fifty years, translating Moroccan storytellers and hosting a generation of Beat writers.