Paul Bowles's seductive, terrifying, exquisitely detached fictions have inspired writers and iconoclasts from the Beats to the present day. In this brilliant and definitive biography, the result of exhaustive research as well as in-depth interviews with Bowles himself and with those who knew him best, Christopher Sawyer-Lau"anno unlocks the mystique that surrounds the man and his work. An Invisible Spectator chronicles Bowles's early years as a composer and rising literary luminary, his marriage to tormented author Jane Bowles, his voluntary exile in North Africa, where he presided over the famous expatriate community of Tangiers--all of it interwoven with vivid depictions of Bowles's intimates, including Truman Capote, Gertrude Stein, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs.