In this interpretive biography of Paul Bowles, one of the most intriguing American expatriate writers and composers, Gena Dagel Caponi concentrates on defining Bowles’s place in twentieth-century American culture. By exploring the motivations behind his life and work and examining the intricate connections between his emotional life and his literary, musical, and autobiographical creations, Caponi illuminates both Bowles’s psychological development and the relationship between his personal idiosyncrasies and the intellectual currents of his time.

Caponi draws upon extensive correspondence and interviews not only with Bowles himself but also with Ned Rorem, Gore Vidal, Aaron Copland, Christopher Isherwood, and Virgil Thomson to provide new insights into Bowles’s work and his relationships with his wife, Jane; his editor at Random House, David McDowell; his London editors, John Lehmann and Peter Owen; and friends Charles Henri Ford, Ahmed Yacoubi, and Mohammed Mrabet.

The author of The Sheltering Sky, one of the very few fully realized expressions of American existentialism, has lived the philosophy he writes about. Only a book that analyzes Bowles’s emotional life in conjunction with his cultural and intellectual reality will be able to explain the complexities of his work. This is such a book.