Tangier Diaries

'Tangier, the white city poised atop the dark continent which turns out to be the continent of light.'Tangier in the 1960s and ’70s was a fabled place. This edge city, the 'Interzone', became muse and escapist's dream for artists, writers, millionaires and socialites, who wrote, painted, partied and experienced life with an intensity and freedom that they never could back home. Into this louche and cosmopolitan world came John Hopkins, a young writer who became a part of the bohemian Tangier crowd with its core of Beats that included William Burroughs, Paul and Jane Bowles and Brion Gysin, as well as Tennessee Williams, Jean Genet, Yves Saint Laurent, Barbara Hutton and Malcolm Forbes. Those intoxicating decades – Tangier's 'Golden Years' – are long gone. Grand old houses that once sparkled with life are shuttered and dark and most of the eccentrics who once lived and loved in the city have died. But here, in the pages of John Hopkins' cult classic, all the decadence and flamboyance of those days is brought to life once more.

An incomparable diarist., [Hopkins] draws the reader into the daily life of what he describes as the “Saigon of the Sahara”, with tales of his encounters with the likes of William Burroughs, Malcolm Forbes, Wilfred Thesiger, Timothy Leary and Rudolf Nureyev [...] a chronicle of an era that has disappeared forever., All lovers of The Sheltering Sky will be grateful for this intimate record of Paul Bowles’s methods and opinions., The Sixties are vividly described and we are plunged into the exotic world centred on writers Paul and Jane Bowles. A hit., A grand read.

John Hopkins was a writer who, after graduating from Princeton, lived for many years in Tangier and was a central figure in the bohemian literary crowd of the '60s and '70s, becoming friends with William Burroughs, Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles. He wrote several novels, among them Tangier Buzzless Flies and The Flight of the Pelican, and travel memoirs including The South American Diaries and The White Nile Diaries.