AllMovie

This documentary profiles the pre-Beat era writer Paul Bowles author of The Sheltering Sky and other classics. He is also a renowned writer of opera and Broadway musicals in the 1940s. Bowles currently lives in Tangier. Bowles was part of an illustrious peer group including Gertrude Stein, Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein, Tennessee Williams and William S. Burroughs ( who in The Naked Lunch made Bowles a central character). The documentary is executed using a combination of personal interviews with Bowles and friends Alan Ginsberg, Ned Rorem and Millicent Dillon, archival filmclips, and many of his musical creations. Bowles also reads some of his own work.