These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. 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. 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. Paul Bowles’s uncompromising explorations into the darker aspects of human existence saw him occupy a curious position in post-war American culture.
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