Paul Frederic Bowles was an American author, translator and composer born in Queens, New York. He was the only child of Rena (née Winnewisser) and Claude Bowles, a dentist. Paul Bowles feared his cold and dominant father, but he was close to his mother who read him the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Bowles wanted to be a writer from an early age, and when he was seventeen one of his poems was printed in a literary magazine.