Paul Bowles was born in 1910 to a middle-class family in New York City. Growing up, he had a difficult relationship with his father but was very close with his mother, who introduced Bowles to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe at a young age. The influence of Poe is very apparent in “A Distant Episode.” The story is, like much of Poe’s work, a horror story with many macabre elements.

In high school, Bowles wrote poetry and edited his school’s literary magazine. In 1928, he enrolled at the University of Virginia, but, dissatisfied with his classes, he abandoned his university studies after a single semester. He then traveled to Paris, where he was introduced to the literary and artistic circle of the poet Gertrude Stein.

Beginning in 1929, Bowles studied music under the famed composer Aaron Copland, with whom he would go on to have a romantic relationship. In 1938, Bowles married Jane Auer, who would later become a novelist and playwright. Throughout their unconventional marriage, Bowles and his wife, Jane, each had extramarital romantic and sexual relationships with members of their own sex. Bowles developed a reputation as an up-and-coming composer for musicals and plays before turning to writing fiction in the 1940s, partly inspired by his wife’s work on her own novel.