The Hindus are busy letting themselves be seen riding in Cadillacs instead of smearing themselves with sandalwood paste and bowing in front of Ganpati. The Moslems would rather miss evening prayer than the new Disney movie. The Buddhists think it's more important to take over in the name of Stalin and Progress than to meditate on the four basic sorrows. And we don't even have to mention Christianity or Judaism.

Chicago Film festival winner. In the Introduction to Bowles's "Collected Stories" (1979) Gore Vidal ranked his short stories "among the best ever written by an American" writing: the floor to this ramshackle civilization that we have built cannot bear much longer our weight. That's what I've achieved.

He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky set in what was known as French North Africa which he had visited in 1931. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s Tangier was his home for the next fifty-two years the remainder of his life. His aPaul Bowless are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.