Little Original Sin:Jane Bowles: Life and Work of Jane Bowles

by Millicent Dillon (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1988

  $3.28

  A biography of Jane Bowles (1917-1973) produced a small collection of work including the novel Two Serious Ladies , her play In the Summer House and a book of stories, all characterized by her elliptical way of seeing things. Jane Bowles was born to a well-off Jewish family and drifted in New York upper-class Bohemian circles in the 1940s, having affairs with women, making her first ventures as a writer, falling in love with and marrying the writer-composer Paul Bowles. When they moved to Tangier in the 1950s, where they lived thereafter, Jane's magnetism and unique style attracted to her such friends as Tennessee Williams, Libby Holman, Cecil Beaton and Truman Capote. But under the glittering surface there was a growing anxiety that eroded her confidence in herself and her art. A passionate, destructive attachment to an Arab women; a writer's block that couldn't be resolved - these were the undoing of a women of immense vitality and talent, who died after a long illness, burnt out at 56, in a convent in Spain.