JANE BOWLES, American writer and playwright (d. 1973); Born into a Jewish family in New York, Jane Bowles spent her childhood in Woodmere, NY, on Long Island. She developed tuberculosis of the knee as a teenager and her mother took her to Switzerland for treatment, where she attended boarding school. As a teenager she returned to New York, where she gravitated to the intellectual bohemia of Greenwich Village and began to experiment in bisexuality. She married writer and composer Paul Bowles in 1938.

In 1943 her novel Two Serious Ladies was published. The Bowleses lived in New York until 1947, when Paul moved to Tangier, Morocco; Jane followed and they both whiled their time indulging their bisexual tastes and receiving the international literati crowd. Jane Bowles wrote the play In The Summer House, which was performed on Broadway in 1953 to mixed reviews. Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and John Ashbery considered her to be one of the finest and most underrated writers of American fiction.