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 January 27, the New York Times reported. She was 99.
Dillon won the O. Henry Award five times for her stories, but devoted most of her writing career to chronicling the Bowleses, focusing particularly on Jane Bowles, the neglected wife of the famous author of The Sheltering Sky (1949). Dillon's efforts "enhanced the status of Jane Bowles as a 'literary cult figure,' as critic Susan Jacoby described her in a 1981 New York Times Book Review piece on Dillon's A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles."
Over the next two decades, Dillon edited 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).
Noting that she felt a special bond with Jane Bowles, who died in 1973, Dillon said in a 2017 interview with Library of America: "From her first words something about what she told, something about what she withheld, her unique style and language, moved me deeply. The notion of time in the work has as much to do with the evasion of time as with time passing. Even as her characters talk about food and plain pleasures, they are obsessed with thoughts of sin and salvation."
Dillon's involvement with Jane and Paul Bowles came after years in which she had concentrated on her own fiction, including the novels The One in the Back Is Medea (1973), The Dance of the Mothers (1991), A Version of Love (2003), and Harry Gold (2000).
In her Library of America interview, Dillon recalled returning to Jane Bowles's work after a number of years away from it: "I was stunned, as I had been in my first reading, by the originality and emotional power of her work. In my rereading I came upon passages where there would be an unexpected turn in thought that would make me laugh out loud. Once again I was reminded of the remarkable alternation in her work between the ludicrous and the mystical."