Henry Valentine Miller (December 26, 1891 -- June 7, 1980) was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional.His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn and Black Spring. He also wrote travel memoirs and essays of literary criticism and analysis.
Although Miller had little or no money the first year in Paris, things began to change with the meeting of Anais Nin who would go on to pay his entire way through the 1930s including the rent for the beautiful and modern apartment at 18, villa Seurat. Anaïs Nin became his lover and financed the first printing of Tropic of Cancer in 1934 with money from Otto Rank.
His works contain detailed accounts of sexual experiences, and his books did much to free the discussion of sexual subjects in American writing from both legal and social restrictions. He continued to write novels that were banned in the United States on the grounds of obscenity. Along with Tropic of Cancer, his Black Spring (1936) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939) were smuggled into his native country, building Miller an underground reputation. One of the first acknowledgments of Henry Miller as a major modern writer was by George Orwell in his 1940 essay Inside the Whale, where he wrote:
" Here in my opinion is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past. Even if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance; and after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses. "
In 1940, he returned to the United States, settling in Big Sur, California, and continued to produce vividly written works that challenged contemporary American cultural values and moral attitudes. He spent the last years of his life at his home in 444 Ocampo Drive, Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California.
The publication of Miller's Tropic of Cancer in the United States in 1961 led to a series of obscenity trials that tested American laws on pornography. The U.S. Supreme Court, in Grove Press, Inc., v. Gerstein, citing Jacobellis v. Ohio (which was decided the same day in 1964), overruled the state court findings of obscenity and declared the book a work of literature; it was one of the notable events in what has come to be known as the sexual revolution. Elmer Gertz, the lawyer who successfully argued the initial case for the novel's publication in Illinois, became a lifelong friend of Miller's. Volumes of their correspondence have been published.
In addition to his literary abilities, Miller was a painter and wrote books about his work in that field. He was a close friend of the French painter Grégoire Michonze. He was also an amateur pianist.
Miller died in Pacific Palisades in 1980. After his death, he was cremated and his ashes scattered off Big Sur.
Miller's papers were donated to the UCLA Young Research Library Department of Special Collections. The Henry Miller Art Museum at Coast Gallery in Big Sur, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and UCLA all hold a selection of Miller's watercolors, as did The Henry Miller Museum of Art in Omachi City in Nagano, Japan, before closing in 2003.
Moloch or, This Gentile World, written in 1927, not published until 1992 (by the Estate of Henry Miller). ISBN 0-8021-3372-X
Crazy Cock, written 1928--1930, not published until 1960. ISBN 0-8021-1412-1
Tropic of Cancer, Paris: Obelisk Press, 1934.
What Are You Going to Do about Alf?, Paris: Printed at author's expense, 1935.
Aller Retour New York, Paris: Obelisk Press, 1935.
Black Spring, Paris: Obelisk Press, 1936. ISBN 0-8021-3182-4
Max and the White Phagocytes, Paris: Obelisk Press, 1938.
Feminist activist Kate Millett has criticized Miller for his depiction of female characters. In her 1970 work Sexual Politics,analyzed Miller alongside D.H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer, finding that each tends to assume a male audience, objectifying female characters in the process. According to Martin B. Duberman, writing for The New Republic on November 27, 1976, Miller ought to be rescued from both Mailer and Millett
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