Destination Tangier – Alive in Tangier: Selections from the Paul Bowles Papers Supplement

Paul and Jane Bowles settled in Tangier in the late 1940s at a time when the port city was jointly administered by several foreign powers as the Tangier International Zone. As such, the city's permissive laws and social mores made Tangier attractive to an expatriate community of artists and writers seeking alternatives to American and European conventions. During the mid-twentieth century, a host of writers and artists, including Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Ira Cohen, and Brion Gysin, sojourned in Tangier, with some creating memorable works while living there.

Paul Bowles wrote frequently about Tangier. In addition to his fiction writing, which often portrayed the collision of Western culture and the physical and social landscapes of North Africa, Bowles wrote non-fiction pieces for travel magazines such as Holiday, where he explored the political and social changes he observed in the city.

With sponsorship from the Library of Congress and a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Paul Bowles began a project in the late 1950s to record and preserve the musical heritage of Morocco, which included the ancestral music of a wide-range of ethnic and religious communities. The project culminated in the album, Music of Morocco, for which Bowles himself provided field notes.

Photograph of Peter Orlovsky, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Alan Ansen, Gregory Corso, Paul Bowles at Villa Muniria, Tangier, 1961