Jane Bowles

Born to an upper class Jewish family in Long Island, New York, and educated in boarding schools in Europe, she gravitated to the intellectual bohemia of Greenwich Village as a teenager and became active in the Young Communists' League, the youth wing of the Communist Party.She also gained a reputation for promiscuity and bisexuality.

She married writer and composer Paul Bowles in 1939. In the same year her book Two Serious Ladies came out. In 1946 she and her husband moved to Tangier, Morocco. She also wrote In The Summer House.

Diagnosed with cancer in 1964, she wrote nothing in the last decade of her life. She died in 1973 in Malaga,Spain, shortly after converting to Catholicism.

The protagonists in Bowles' first novel, The Sheltering Sky are based on him and Jane.