The Dream at the End of the World

To the expatriates who landed there in the post-war years, the International Zone of Tangier was an exotic and deliciously depraved version of Eden. A sybaritic outpost set against the verdant hills of North Africa, it offered a free money market and a moral climate in which only murder and rape were forbidden. Fleeing angst-ridden Western culture, European emigres found a haven where homosexuality was openly tolerated, drugs were readily available, and eccentricity was held to be a social asset. This work presents a portrait of an extraordinary group of individuals including William Burroughs, Truman Capote, Libby Holman, Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Barbara Hutton. A city of writers and heiresses, drug addicts and pederasts, artist and con-men. All were lured by a raffish city that promised a full range of unconventional pleasures. At the centre of this extravagant community werre Paul and Jane Bowles. A critically acclaimed writer and composer, Paul found Morocco the perfect setting for his perverse visionary fiction, and for the quotidian intrigue that he loved.
For Jane - a brilliant playwright plagued by anxiety and terrified of her own talent - Tangier was as sinister as it was tantalizing. When her husband became mentor to a young Moroccan painter, she fell in love with a manipulative peasant woman who, some said, used black magic to keep Jane in her sway. Born and raised in Atlanta, Michelle Green studied journalism at the University of Geogia. After two years as a reporter for the "Atlanta constitution", she became a senior writer at "People", where she has worked since 1983. She has written for "Mirabella", "California", the "Washington Journal Review", the "Los Angeles Herald Examiner" and the "Washington Post".