Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Born Jane Auer in 1917 to a suburban Jewish middle-class family, at 15 she suffered a riding accident that left one leg permanently damaged. She enjoyed a sensitive and fairly madcap adolescence, and in 1937 she met John Bowles, the composer and write, and despite her frank lesbianism, they married. Until her death in 1973 maintained one of the more freakish, yet touchingly profound marriages on record. Though her body of work was relatively small, Bowles enjoyed a large literary influence, with Edmund White writing that "the luminous pages she left behind comprise some of the best American fiction we have." Besides her literary output, Bowles's letters--to Virgil Thomson, Carl Van Vechten, Carson McCullers, and Paul Bowles, and about John Ashbery, William Burroughs, Aaron Copland, Ira Gershwin, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Paul Robeson, Susan Sontag, Alice Toklas, Gore Vidal, and Eudora Welty, among others--are by turns candid and heartbreaking, both serious and seriously funny.

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