Person

Miller, Henry, 1891-1980

1891-1980

Henry Valentine Miller was born on December 26, 1891, in New York, New York.

He was an American novelist. He was brought up in Brooklyn, and he wrote about his childhood experiences there in “Black Spring” (1936). In 1924, he left his job with Western Union in New York to devote himself to writing. In 1930, he went to France. His novel “Tropic of Cancer” (published in France in 1934 and the United States in 1961) is based on his hand-to-mouth existence in Depression-ridden Paris. “Tropic of Capricorn” (France, 1939; U.S., 1961) draws on the earlier New York phase. Miller’s visit to Greece in 1939 inspired “The Colossus of Maroussi” (1941), a meditation on the significance of that country. In 1940/1941, he toured the United States extensively and wrote a sharply critical account of it, “The Air-Conditioned Nightmare” (1945), which dwelt on the cost in human terms of mechanization and commercialization. He settled in Big Sur on the California coast, where he wrote his “Rosy Crucifixion trilogy”, made up of Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus (1965). The publication of the “Tropics” in the United States provoked a series of obscenity trials that culminated in 1964 in a Supreme Court decision rejecting state court findings that the book was obscene. Other important books by Miller are the collections of essays “The Cosmological Eye” (1939) and “The Wisdom of the Heart” (1941). He was also a watercolourist; he exhibited internationally and wrote about art in “To Paint Is To Love Again” (1960). Miller also wrote travel memoirs and literary criticism. Various volumes of his correspondence have been published: with Lawrence Durrell (1963), to Anaïs Nin (1965), and with Wallace Fowlie (1975).

He had been married five times. He died on June 7, 1980, in Los Angeles, California.