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Paul Bowles, '28 Writer Paul Bowles Dies at 88 By MEL GUSSOW Paul Bowles, the novelist, composer, poet and quintessential outsider of American literature, died of a heart attack Thursday in a hospital in Tangier, Morocco. He was 88, and throughout his life, he remained an artist whose name evoked an atmosphere of dark, lonely Moroccan streets and endless scorching deserts, a haze of hashish and drug-induced visions. Bowles was taken to the hospital on Nov. 7 from his home in Tangier, where he had lived since 1947. He was most famous for his stories and his novels, especially "The Sheltering Sky." He was also known for his songs, concertos, incidental music and operas; for his marriage to Jane Bowles a novelist and playwright who died in 1973, and, simply, for being Paul Bowles. He became an icon of individualism. Although he remained elusive to his biographers as well as his critics, his life as an expatriate was as fascinating as his own experiments in art.

One of the last of his cultural generation, what might be called the post-Lost Generation, he knew and occasionally collaborated with many of the major artistic figures of his time, among them Orson Welles, Tennessee Williams and Gertrude Stein. He put a stamp of sui generis on whatever he chose to do, or not to do. In many ways, his career was one of avoidance.

In an interview with The New York Times in 1995, the last time he visited New York, he said that a typical Bowles fictional character "slips through life, if possible without touching anything, without touching other people." Asked if that was how he lived his own life, he admitted: "I've tried. It's hard. If you discover you're affecting other people, you have to stop doing whatever you're doing."

Bowles's fiction deals with civilization overcome by savagery, a world in which innocence is corrupted and delirium thrives. At the core is a feeling of isolation, self-contained compartments in which people live alone and are fearful of communication. As he said in an interview in The Paris Review in 1981, "Everyone is isolated from everyone else." A Place Of Wisdom, Ecstasy, Even Death.

(Read the rest of this obituary from the New York Times, November 19, 1999, here.)

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(The above was excerpted from the website: "Writer Paul Bowles Dies at 88" on 3/4/04 at http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/111999obit-p-bowles.html)

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