Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The Sheltering Sky | 1949 |
| Let It Come Down | 1952 |
| The Spider’s House | 1955 |
| Up Above the World | 1966 |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
| Too Far from Home | 1991 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| A Little Stone | 1950 |
| The Delicate Prey and Other Stories | 1950 |
| The Hours After Noon | 1959 |
| A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard | 1962 |
| The Time of Friendship | 1967 |
| Pages from Cold Point and Other Stories | 1968 |
| Three Tales | 1975 |
| Things Gone and Things Still Here | 1977 |
| Midnight Mass | 1981 |
| Points in Time | 1982 |
| Unwelcome Words: Seven Stories | 1988 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| Yallah | 1957 |
| Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue | 1963 |
| Without Stopping | 1972 |
| Two Years Beside the Strait | 1990 |
| Days: Tangier Journal | 1991 |
| 17, Quai Voltaire | 1993 |
About Paul Bowles
Paul Bowles (1910 to 1999) was an American novelist, short story writer, composer and translator who lived in Tangier, Morocco, for the last 52 years of his life. His first novel, “The Sheltering Sky” (1949), set in French North Africa, was a critical and popular success and remains his best-known book.
Bowles was born in Jamaica, Queens, New York, the only child of a dentist. He entered the University of Virginia in 1928 but left for Paris the following year. He studied composition with Aaron Copland, and the two first visited Tangier in 1931 on the advice of Gertrude Stein. Back in New York from 1937, he built a reputation as a composer, writing music for stage productions by Orson Welles, Tennessee Williams and others. In 1938 he married the writer Jane Auer.
He returned to prose in 1945 with short stories including “A Distant Episode”. A contract for a novel from Doubleday in 1947 paid for his move to Tangier, where Jane joined him the following year. “The Sheltering Sky” follows three Americans, Port, his wife Kit and their friend Tunner, on a journey through the Algerian desert. Doubleday rejected the manuscript, and it was first published in England by John Lehmann in September 1949, with an American edition from New Directions a month later.
“Let It Come Down” (1952) is set in Tangier and traces the disintegration of an American, Nelson Dyar. “The Spider’s House” (1955) takes place in Fez during the struggle for Moroccan independence from France. “Up Above the World” (1966) was his fourth and last novel. He also published short story collections throughout his career, beginning in 1950 with “A Little Stone” and “The Delicate Prey and Other Stories”, and received the Rea Award for the Short Story in 1991.
Alongside his own writing, Bowles translated the work of Moroccan storytellers and authors including Mohammed Mrabet and Mohamed Choukri, and between 1959 and 1961 he recorded traditional Moroccan music with support from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Library of Congress. His autobiography, “Without Stopping”, appeared in 1972. He made a cameo appearance in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1990 film of “The Sheltering Sky”. Bowles died of heart failure in Tangier on 18 November 1999, aged 88.