Henry Miller
Henry Miller’s life and writings tested current boundaries as much as they inspired new generations of artists. Born in 1891 in Brooklyn, New York, Miller wandered through numerous jobs before leaving for Paris with his second wife, June Miller in 1928. Miller would be married and divorced five times. In addition to using his marriages for material, his relationship with Anais Nin would be documented in her diaries and the publication of his letters to her. Based in Paris in the thirties, Miller wrote his semi-autobiographical and explicit novel, Tropic of Cancer (1934). Although the work about a young man’s journey through friends, lovers, and life received praise from such disparate writers as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pond, the book would be banned in the United States until 1961 for indecency. Two more books written in Paris suffered the same fate, Black Spring, written in 1936 but banned in the US until 1963, and Tropic of Capricorn, written in 1939 but banned until 1962. At the end of the thirties, Miller traveled to Greece to visit the novelist Lawrence Durrell. Miller wrote about his trip through Greece, The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), which is still today one of the most well-known and well-read travel books. In 1940, Miller came back to America, settling in California. His writing continued to cover a wide range of travel, personal experiences, and the literary impulse including The Air-conditioned Nightmare (1945) on America; Remember to Remember (1947), The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder (1948), The Time of the Assassins (1956) about the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1958) on life in California, The World of Lawrence: A Passionate Appreciation (1980) on D.H. Lawrence, and his well known trilogy, The Rosy Crucifixion which includes the novels Sexus (1949), Plexus (1953), and Nexus (1960). Miller had a direct influence on the Beat writers, such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and when his earlier books became available in the United States in the sixties a new generation discovered a writer who was as honest as he was open. Warren Beatty captured Miller on film as one of the documentary witnesses for the film Reds. Miller died in 1980.
