Paul Bowles was born in New York City, the only child of Claude Dietz Bowles, a dentist, and Rena Winewisser. He attended the University of Virginia for two semesters, drawn to the school because Edgar Allan Poe had been a student there. He also briefly studied at the School of Design and Liberal Arts in New York.

As a child he wrote fiction and at sixteen tried surrealist poetry, writing without conscious control. He became a published poet at nineteen when transition, an English-language magazine published in France, accepted his poems. Between the ages of nineteen and twenty-eight Bowles composed music, studying under Aaron Copland in New York and Berlin (1930-1932) and under Virgil Thomson in Paris (1933-1934). Much of his fame today is for his musical compositions, especially the scores for South Pacific (1943), The Glass Menagerie (1945), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1956). For his music he received a...