LGBT Literature: JANE BOWLES OUT IN THE WORLD

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Tuesday November 19, 2013 · 3:07 PM PST

2013/11/19 · 15:07

Jane Bowles (1917-1973) is perhaps one of America’s greatest yet least well-known gay writers. That is somewhat understandable, in part, because her body of work is rather slim. The expanded edition of her collected works, published five years after death, still numbered less than 500 pages. Still, her 1943 novel Two Serious Ladies has been praised by other writers such as Alan Sillitoe and Tennessee Williams as one of the most significant works of modern American literature. Rick Whitaker has argued recently that Two Serious Ladies is “among the central queer works of literary art” with its near perfect portrait “of what it’s like to be a sexual outsider with the belief … that there is significance—and a state of grace, so to speak—to be gleaned from the experience of being gay.”

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