Tangier is more New York than New York. ... Then you must see how alike the two places are. The life revolves wholly about the making of money. Practically everyone is dishonest. In New York you have Wall Street, here you have the Bourse. ... In New York you have the slick financiers, here the money changers. In New York you have your racketeers. Here you have your smugglers. And you have every nationality and no civic pride.

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.