Paul Bowles

First edition of Bowles's first novel, the grim and enduring twentieth-century classic of alienated Americans wandering through North Africa towards destruction.

• Paul Bowles (American).
• London: John Lehman, (1949).
• 304 pages.
• Original grey cloth, spine stamped in blue and gilt, in original unclipped pictorial dust jacket by Fred Uhlman.

Bowles's masterpiece, often praised as pitiless and dazzling, like the sun - beautiful, but not good for the eyes - was written in several Algerian hotel bedrooms over a period of nine months. "My idea was that the people would keep moving into the desert," he explained to Jay McInerney, "that one would get ill and die, and at that point it would write itself." The book was written, or wrote itself, for "a postwar reading public that was still shockable" (Theroux), and as a reading public loves to be shocked, it became a best-seller.