He knew it was necessary to drive the French out, but he had always imagined that this would be done gloriously, with thousands of men on horseback flashing their swords and calling upon Allah to aid them in their holy mission ... It was hard to see any connection between the splendid war of liberation and all this whispering and frowning.

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.