General
Millicent Dillon, Chronicler of Jane and Paul Bowles, Dies at 99
A novelist and short-story writer, she devoted years to a nonfiction project examining of the lives of two eccentric authors who spent decades in Morocco.
Millicent Dillon, a novelist and prizewinning short-story writer who was best known for nonfiction that chronicled the eccentric, expatriate American literary couple Jane and Paul Bowles, died on Monday in Daly City, Calif. She was 99.
Her death, in a memory-care facility, was confirmed by the writer Wendy Lesser, her daughter.
Ms. Dillon trained as a physicist and worked at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee after World War II before she turned to writing after. Disturbed by the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, she told an interviewer for the blog The Awl in 2016, “By the end of the war I knew I had to search elsewhere for my work in life.”
Ms. Dillon won the coveted O. Henry Award five times for her stories, but she devoted most of her writing career to the Bowleses — especially Jane, the neglected wife of the much better known Paul, whose 1949 novel, “The Sheltering Sky,” is widely regarded as a classic. “The Sheltering Sky” is set in North Africa, where the Bowleses lived for decades, mainly in Tangier, Morocco.
Ms. Dillon’s efforts enhanced the status of Jane Bowles as a “literary cult figure,” as the critic Susan Jacoby described her in assessing Ms. Dillon’s “A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles” in The New York Times Book Review in 1981.
“A Little Original Sin” marked the beginning of a sustained project by Ms. Dillon to bring Jane Bowles’s small but significant literary output into the public eye. Over the next two decades, she would edit “Out in the World: Selected Letters of Jane Bowles, 1935-1970” (1985), “The Portable Paul and Jane Bowles” (1994) and, for the Library of America, “Jane Bowles: Collected Writings” (2017). She also wrote the biography “You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles” (1998).