"Paul Bowles - novelist, composer, expatriate, rebel, and bisexual - is one of the most compelling and mythologized figures in twentieth-century American culture. Born in 1910, Bowles grew up in Jamaica, New York, a precocious child who could read by the age of three and was writing stories within the year. At eighteen, he embarked on an artistic journey that led him all over the world. Remarkably gifted, Bowles entered the vibrant art and literary world of the late 1920s and early '30s as a poet and composer. He studied music with composer Aaron Copland and was a friend of Gertrude Stein, W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Ned Rorem, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Stephen Spender, and Christopher Isherwood (who named his character Sally Bowles after him.) Over the course of his career he composed scores for films and innumerable plays, including many works by Tennessee Williams and Orson Welles. It wasn't until after he married Jane Auer that he began writing fiction: The Delicate Prey, The Spider's House, Let It Come Down, and The Sheltering Sky, which he wrote after moving to Tangier in 1947, and which was immediately hailed as a classic." "It is Bowles's flamboyant life that most fascinates people - his friendships, his appetites, his controversial marriage, his leftist politics, his voluntary exile to Morocco, and his stature as a countercultural and gay icon. Through ten years of research, thirteen trips to Bowles's home in Tangier, extensive interviews with some two hundred of Bowles's acquaintances, and her own intimate relationship with Bowles, who died in 1999, Virginia Spencer Carr has gathered a wealth of information about Bowles."--BOOK JACKET.