A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles [Paperback]

Millicent Dillon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1998

Tennessee Williams called Jane Bowles "the most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters." John Ashbery said she was "one of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language," consistently producing "the surprise that is the one essential ingredient of great art." Here, available again, is the only biography of this powerful writer.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A compassionate account of Jane Bowles's life and an engrossing history of her milieu. Dillon seems to have tracked down just about everyone who knew Paul and Jane . . . Ned Rorem, Edwin Denby, Tennessee Williams, Peggy Guggenheim, Dione Lewis, and scores of others contribute richly to the tapestry. Paul [Bowles] supported Dillon's effort, and his commentary is especially incisive." -- Laurie Stone, Village Voice

"A thorough biography of Jane Bowles, a book that never cheaply psychoanalyzes its subject but rather presents the woman and her work with sensitivity and admiration. . . . Grim as [Jane Bowles's] personal story may be, the luminous pages she left behind comprise some of the best American fiction we have. She is far more genuine and original than many other more celebrated writers. Among American women writers she must rank in the small, select company of Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Willa Cather, and Jean Stafford." -- Edmund White, Chicago Tribune

About the Author

Millicent Dillon is a novelist and a biographer. She is the author of You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles and other works including The Dance of the Mothers and After Egypt: Isadora Duncan and Mary Cassatt. She lives in San Francisco.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 476 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (April 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520211936
• ISBN-13: 978-0520211933
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #605,526 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Biography about a Great Experiemntal Writer, April 25, 2004

By 

Megan A. Burns "meganaburns" (new orleans, louisiana United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles (Paperback)

This is a wonderfully well-written biography. It traces the interesting, complicated, humorous and intriguing life of the writer Jane Bowles. Married to writer and composer, Paul Bowles, it follows them on their many travels and their many friendships. Bowles approached life in her own peculiar way, and this aspect is captured by Dillon. The frustrations, anxieties and insecurities are caught in Bowles' many letters to friends. Dillon does a great job researching the illnesses that plagued Bowles near the end of her life, and Dillon is sensitive to how these roadblocks affected a deeply talented writer.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Original Biography, August 9, 2006

By 

Arch Llewellyn "arch-l" - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles (Paperback)

It's hard not to appreciate the elbow grease Millicent Dillon put into assembling the facts of Jane Bowles's tumultuous life just a few years after her death in 1973. Dillon includes generous excerpts from Bowles's letters and interviews most of the major players in her circle. But I found myself wishing she'd take more of a stab at finding a larger interpretation or meaning to Bowles's career, working her into a wider context that would help make sense of her writing and her times. The roots of Bowles's desperate alcoholism, her fear of writing in the shadow of Paul's success, her original, highly unusual approach to sexuality & gender in a more stringent time and place, her tangled relationship with Judaism, her fascination with the culture (and women) of Tangier: Dillon touches on these topics, but her reluctance to take Jane's life on any terms other than the author's own, or those of her close-knit circle, give the biography a sad, claustrophobic feel: it seems like a lot of ink to spill on someone who spent much of her life searching for ways to avoid writing. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think Bowles would benefit from a biographer more plugged in to the academic world, someone familiar with contemporary issues in queer studies or gender theory or Jewish-American lit, to really bring Jane's achievement to life.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Strange and deeply engrossing, November 4, 2007

By 

Teresa Carpenter "cafe reader" (New York,NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles (Paperback)

A little Original Sin is a superb biography of Jane Bowles, the child-woman whose outre lifestyle both energized and sometimes overshadowed her fiction. She and husband, composer Paul Bowles, manned an outpost of American bohemia in Morocco where they played host to such luminaries as Tennessee Williams, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote.

When she met Bowles in 1937, Jane was as-yet unpublished. She had been crippled in one knee by polio; he from the psychological abuse of a tyrannical father. It's possible that their marriage -- arranged to shock their families -- was never consummated. They do seem to have enjoyed a tender and childlike camaraderie. According to biographer Dillon, the two relished role-playing games. (A favorite plotline included a parrot whose single utterance, "bupple," became their pet name for one another.)

Although Jane's literary reputation rests upon a slender body of work -- a novel, a play, and a collection of short stories -- her "originality" dazzled the likes of Gertrude Stein. Fragile, kittenish and indecisive, JB could also be a headstrong explorer and beguiling conversationlist. Ironically, it was the publication of her first novel, Two Serious Ladies, that encouraged her husband to write fiction. His own first novel, The Sheltering Sky, was a literary and commercial success. As Paul grew more productive, Jane became distracted by drink, drugs and an obsessive desire for an Arabic lesbian who milked her for cash and possibly poisoned her. Her decline is harrowing, but A Little Original Sin offers a tantalizing glimpse of ex-patriot life in the International Zone of Tangier in the 1950s as well as a trip into Jane's truly extraordinary mind.

(If you enjoyed this book, check out JB's collected works in, My Sister's Hand in Mind. Farrar, Straus and Giroux Classics.)