The Sheltering Sky

First edition. Crown 8vo. 304pp. Publisher's grey cloth, titled in gilt to blue spine panel. Lacking the scarce Fred Uhlman illustrated dustjacket. Foxing to top edge, dulled spine, minor soiling to boards, else a Very Good, fresh, tight copy. 1/4000 copies printed. Precedes the New Directions U.S. edition by a month, following Doubleday's rejection of Bowles's manuscript.

Author's first book. Hailed as an existentialist masterpiece by this mythical forerunner of the Beat Generation. Named by The Modern Library as one of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th century. Listed by TIME Magazine in their Best English-language Novels selection (1923–2005).

Conceived on a ride on a Fifth Avenue bus in the 40's while he was scoring Broadway shows and working as a music critic for the New York Herald Tribune, the novel took him a mere eight months to write on his subsequent travels through Morocco and Algeria. In his letters home he dismissively referred to it as "a triangle laid in the Sahara". However, he also incisively described it as "an adventure story, in which the actual adventures take place on two planes simultaneously: in the actual desert, and in the inner desert of the spirit."

Filmed in 1990 by Bernardo Bertolucci with John Malkovich, and Debra Winger as the alienated expatriate couple, wracked by existential angst that are claimed by an unforgiving desert, and with Bowles himself in a cameo role. "It stands head and shoulders above most other novels published in English since World War II. The story is brilliantly told against the vast, shimmering, desolate space of the desert, that contains and dominates the action." –O. B. Hardison, Jr., New Republic

[Miller A2a]