About the Author

Henry Miller was born in New York City on December 26, 1891. Miller briefly attended City College of New York, but abandoned his university studies after only two months. In 1930 Miller traveled to Paris, where he stayed until 1940. During this period he was financed by his lover and fellow writer, Anaïs Nin, who helped him obtain a first printing of the celebrated and controversial Tropic of Cancer (1934); the book was banned in the United States at the time Grove Press printed it in 1961, which promptly initiated a costly, but successful, Supreme Court case to overrule the ban.

In 1940 Miller returned to the United States, specifically to Big Sur, California where he would make his residence for the next several decades. Other notable works of Miller include Tropic of Capricorn (1939), The Rosy Crucifixion: Sexus (1949), Plexus (1953), Nexus (1960), Black Spring (1936), and Crazy Cock (1960).

Henry Miller died in 1980, in Pacific Palisades.

Reviews

"There is nothing like Henry Miller when he gets rolling. . . . One has to take the language back to Marlowe and Shakespeare before encountering a wealth of imagery equal in intensity." --Norman Mailer"There is an eager vitality and exuberance to the writing . . . we watchfully hear the language skip, whoop and wheel across Miller's pages." --William H. Gass"The most enthralling and hilarious explosions are the sexual ones." --Newsweek"A superb entertainment that brings in jeremiads, casual lyrics, and sudden reaches toward the spiritual core of life . . ." --The New York Times Book Review"Miller has once and for all blasted away the very foundation of human hypocrisy--moral, social, and political. . . . The grandest passages are the scenes of lovemaking. They join in a grand paean to all that is still joyous, healthy, happy, and affirmative." --The Nation"American literature today begins and ends with the meaning of what Miller has done." --Lawrence Durell