Paul Bowles: Romantic Savage - Hardcover

Gena Dagel Caponi-Tabery

9780809319237: Paul Bowles: Romantic Savage

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809319233 ISBN 13: 9780809319237

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994

In this interpretive biography of Paul Bowles, one of the most intriguing American expatriate writers and composers, Gena Dagel Caponi concentrates on defining Bowles’s place in twentieth-century American culture. By exploring the motivations behind his life and work and examining the intricate connections between his emotional life and his literary, musical, and autobiographical creations, Caponi illuminates both Bowles’s psychological development and the relationship between his personal idiosyncrasies and the intellectual currents of his time.

Caponi draws upon extensive correspondence and interviews not only with Bowles himself but also with Ned Rorem, Gore Vidal, Aaron Copland, Christopher Isherwood, and Virgil Thomson to provide new insights into Bowles’s work and his relationships with his wife, Jane; his editor at Random House, David McDowell; his London editors, John Lehmann and Peter Owen; and friends Charles Henri Ford, Ahmed Yacoubi, and Mohammed Mrabet.

The author of The Sheltering Sky, one of the very few fully realized expressions of American existentialism, has lived the philosophy he writes about. Only a book that analyzes Bowles’s emotional life in conjunction with his cultural and intellectual reality will be able to explain the complexities of his work. This is such a book.

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About the Author:

Gena Dagel Caponi teaches cultural and intellectual history and is the acting director of American Studies at the University of Texas, San Antonio. She is the editor of Conversations with Paul Bowles.

Review:

Caponi is particularly good on Bowles’ abandoned career as a composer, reminding us that one of the few things lacking in the current bumper crop of Bowles material is a good recording of his jazzy, bittersweet music. She’s also good at placing Bowles on the literary map.” San Francisco Review of Books

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