The American playwright Tennessee Williams first met Paul and Jane Bowles in Acapulco, Mexico in 1940, when he was still unknown. In subsequent years, he made occasional visits to see Paul and Jane Bowles in Tangier, where he enjoyed writing while relaxing and exploring other areas in Morocco. He sometimes wrote at the Sun Beach, a beach-front restaurant where could also eat and drink while enjoying the ocean views and sunshine.

Williams wrote the play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Sun Beach while on vacation in Morocco, and the actual setting for Cabeza de Lobo in his 1958 play Suddenly, Last Summer is the tranquil town of Asilah, Morocco. It was later adapted into a successful film in 1959 by Columbia Pictures that starred Elizabeth Taylor, Katherine Hepburn and Montgomery Clift, with a cameo appearance by another of Paul Bowles' friends, the writer and novelist Gore Vidal.

Tennessee Williams in Tangier, written by Mohamed Choukri, was translated by Paul Bowles, who closely collaborated with Choukri on the translation. The work was first published by Cadmus Editions in 1979. 

In May 1973 when Williams learned that his dear friend Jane Bowles had died and that there had been no printed obituary in the New York Times, he demanded that the newspaper print an announcement, which it did almost three weeks after her death. The gazebo at his Key West, Florida home was named "The Summer House" in her memory.

This 1947 portrait Tennessee Williams, Provincetown was acquired by The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. in February 2007.

Born April 24 1928; died January 18, 2001

Gavin Young was born on April 24, 1928 in Bude, Cornwall and spent his youth in southern Wales. He studied modern history at Rugby and Trinity College at Oxford. In 1950 at age 22, after military service in the Welsh Guards, mostly in Palestine, he worked for two years with a shipping company in Basra, Iraq, and learned some Arabic. Young later moved to southern Iraq where he lived with the Marsh Arabs, in the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Still later, Young lived in the mountains and plains with the people of the southwestern Arabian peninsula.

In Tangier, during the early 1950s Gavin Young befriended Ian Fleming, then on leave from London's Sunday Times, when Fleming was writing his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, at Tangier's luxury El Minzah Hôtel. Beginning in 1959 Gavin Young worked for Radio Maroc in Rabat, Morocco.

While in Tunisia in 1960, Gavin Young joined the staff of The Observer as a foreign correspondent, and for the next 20 years he covered fifteen wars and revolutions throughout the world. His first book, Return to the Marshes: Life Among the Marsh Arabs of Iraq (Wm. Collins & Sons. Co., 1977; Arrow/Random House UK, 1983), the basis for a 1979 film, is about the people who inhabit the ancient lands of Sumer and Babylonia. Young's second book, Iraq: Land of Two Rivers (Wm. Collins & Sons. Co., 1980), is his account of a journey through the historic landscape of Mesopotamia.

Young's around-the-world travels by sea provided the basis for his bestselling classic books Slow Boats to China (Penguin UK, 1980; Hutchinson, 1981; E. P. Dutton, 1984; Penguin Books Ltd., 2001)) and Slow Boats Home (Penguin UK, 1983; Random House, 1986). From Sea to Shining Sea: A Present-Day Journey Through America's Past, was published by Hutchinson and Random House (UK) in 1995 and by Penguin, New York in 1996. In 1999, Penguin UK published Eye on the World: A Celebration of a Lifetime's Travel to the World's Most Exotic, Beautiful and Dangerous Places; and Viking UK published in 1997 his A Wavering Grace: A Vietnamese Family in War and Peace. Other works by Gavin Young include Halfway Around the World: An Improbable Journey, Worlds Apart: Travels in War and Peace, Something of Samoa and In Search of Conrad.

Unusual for a journalist and war correspondent, Gavin Young was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was a member of the Foreign Correspondents' Club, Hong Kong. He died in London, England on January 18, 2001, at age 72.

Paul Bowles and Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Tangier, 1989

Rodrigo Rey Rosa with Kenneth Lisenbee in Tangier, Morocco, 1988