Paul Bowles

Inscribed first US 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).
• (New York): New Directions, (1949).
• 318 pages.
• Inscribed by Bowles on half title. 
• Original tan cloth, in original unclipped ($2.75) dust jacket by Alvin Lustig.

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."