Abstract
Paul Bowles’s uncompromising explorations into the darker aspects of human existence saw him occupy a curious position in post-war American culture. Given the era’s predominant urge to celebrate the familiar and cozy, Bowles’s depictions of extreme and often random violence in prose characterized by “a terrifying and macabre stillness that scarcely masks a cruel and compassionless universe,”1 his status as an expatriate in North Africa, his brief membership in the Communist Party during the late 1930s, and his open disavowals of modernity (of which America was perhaps the leading example) seem more likely to promise commercial failure than success. Nevertheless, The Sheltering Sky (1949) remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 10 weeks in early 1950 and sold more than 200,000 paperback copies in 1951.
I was running toward something, although I didn’t know what at the time… I found it over the years. What I was ultimately running toward was my grave.
Paul Bowles, “The Art of fiction LXVIP”
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Notes
Anne Folz, “Paul Bowles,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 20, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 81.
Paul Bowles quoted in Yosefa Loshitzky, “The Tourist/Traveler Gaze: Bertolucci and Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky,” East-West Film Journal 7, no. 2 (1993), 130.
John Aldridge, After the Lost Generation: A Critical Study of the Writers of Two Wars (New York: McGraw Hill, 1951), 192.
Leslie Fishbein, “The Snake Pit (1948): The Sexist Nature of Sanity,” in Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context, ed. Peter C. Rollins (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 135.
Jessica Weis, To Have and to Hold: Marriage, the Baby Boom and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
Joanne Jay Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America 1945–1965 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994).
See Marion Nowack, “How to Be a Woman: Theories of Female Education in the 1950’s,” Journal of Popular Culture IX (Summer 1975): 77–83.
See Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963).
See Veda Semarne, “The Snake Pit: A Woman’s Serpentine Journey Towards (W)holeness,” Literature/Film Quarterly 22, no. 3 (1994): 144–50.
Catherine Rainwater, “‘Sinister Overtones,’ ‘Terrible Phrases’: Poe’s Influence on the Writing of Paul Bowles,” Essays in Literature 2 (Fall 1984): 253–66.
Brian T. Edwards, “Sheltering Screens: Paul Bowles and Foreign Relations,” American Literary History 17, no. 2 (2005): 314.
Allen Hibbard, Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne, 1993), 15.
Millicent Dillon, You Are Not I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 173.
Yosefa Loshitzky, “Orientalist Representations: Palestinians and Arabs in Some Postcolonial Film and Literature,” in Cultural Encounters: Representing Otherness, ed. Elizabeth Hallam and Brian V. Street (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 61.
Morris Dickstein, “On and Off the Road: The Outsider as Young Rebel,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature: Prose Writing 1940–1990. ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Cyrus R. K. Patell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 157.
David Rudrum, “Living Alone: Solipsism in Heart of Darkness” Philosophy and Literature 29, no. 2 (October 2005): 409.
Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings from ‘Being and Time’ (1927) to ‘The Task of Thinking’ (1964), ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 103.
Gena Dagel Caponi, ed., Conversations with Paul Bowles (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), 123.
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© 2011 Erin Mercer
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Mercer, E. (2011). The Familiar Made Strange: Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky . In: Repression and Realism in Post-War American Literature. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119093_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119093_6
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