Paul Bowles in Tangier

“Paul Bowles is a storyteller of the utmost purity and integrity. He writes of a world before God became man; a world in which men and women in extremis are seen as components in a larger, more elemental drama. His prose is crystalline and his voice unique. Among living American masters of the short story, Paul Bowles is sui generis."  cited a member of the jury that awarded Paul Bowles the Rea Award for the Short Story in 1991.

Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Attracted by its aura of strangeness and wonder, Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco in 1947 to spend  53 of his 88 years in North Africa. Thus, he became identified with the city. It was his home for the last fifty-three years of his life and it became the symbol of his expatriate status.

His well-known novel The Sheltering Sky, which established for his popular success, came into being while he was in Tangier in 1949. He has been for long approached as a fiction writer concerned with representing other cultures, assuming the role of ethnographer and taking the role of cultural outsider. His writings and translations about Morocco are all imbued with an Anthropological spirit. He used Moroccan authors & illitrate story-tellers as informants while seeking the irritrievable "Primitive" and "Authentic" of a civilisation on the verge of vanishing as he admits: " Like any Romantic, I had always been vaguely certain that sometimes during my life I should come into a magic place which in disclosing its secrets would give me wisdom and ecstasy- perhaps even death. And now, I stood in the wind looking at the mountains ahead, I felt the stirring of the engine within, and it was as if I were drawing close to the solution of an as-yet-unposed problem."

Bowles most noteworthy collaboration was with Mohamed Choukri in the publication of For Bread Alone in 1973. Bowles' translation of this work played a liberating role for it was meant to make Choukri's voice be heard. The Arabic version of this novel did not appear until 1982 to be banned, due to the taboo subjects it dealt with, some time untill 2000. Yet some researchers argue that these writings are mere inventions of his imagination since he used illiterate informants and manipulated them. They are mere projections of his fragmented personality and his quest for the noble savage.