Tea on the Mountain is a short story by Paul Bowles. Written in 1939, the story first appeared in the 1950 collection The Delicate Prey and Other Stories published by Random House. “Tea on the Mountain" was penned by the 28-year-old Bowles while he was living in an apartment in Columbia Heights, District of Columbia. Bowles would return to the plot and themes of this story with “A Time of Friendship (1962). The story is the earliest short fiction of Bowles’s ourve and is included in Paul Bowles: Collected Stories, 1939-1976 (1980) by Black Sparrow Press.