Henry Miller

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American writer whose books were banned as obscene in the U.S. for many years. His works were drawn, for the most part, from personal experience and observation with stories of the women he loved and the friends he cherished. A late bloomer, Miller, who was raised in Brooklyn, was first published at age 42 while living in Paris. His "Tropic of Cancer" was followed by "Tropic of Capricorn," 1939, and the trilogy "Rosy Crucifixion" in 1949, 1953 and 1959. Miller's most important books had been published originally in France, and were banned in the United States until 1961. Highly eccentric, Miller also had a second career as a watercolor painter, and for years, made more money from that than he did from his writing. Miller was born to lower-middle class parents in the Yorkville section of New York City. In 1892, the Millers moved across the East River to Williamsburg and Henry was raised in that part of Brooklyn. In 1909, he entered the City College of New York, and left after two months. He took a job with the Atlas Portland Cement company in Manhattan. Two years later, his father, a merchant tailor, financed him to go to Cornell University. Miller took the money and disappeared with his mistress, a lover who was old enough to be his mother. He returned home a year later, then left for good to go West. He worked in the Southwest, mostly as a ranch hand, and became interested in movements such as the Industrial Workers of the World. In 1914, Miller assisted his ailing father in his tailor shop, and began writing in his spare time. After clerking in government agencies in Washington, DC, he became an employment manager with Western Union Telegraph Company in New York City in 1920. During a three-week vacation from that time, in 1923, he wrote his first book, which was never published. He was married for seven years to Beatrice Sylvas Wickens, a Brooklyn piano teacher, with whom he had a daughter, Barbara. In 1924, he divorced her and married June Smith (also called June Mansfield in some bios), a dancer with literary aspirations whom he had met a year earlier. This marked the beginning of a tempestuous lifestyle in which he came to the brink of suicide, but also the time in which he was first free to give his full attention to writing. He quit his job, living off the money that June managed to get from other men. June fascinated Miller with her numerous intrigues with others, men and women alike, and some Miller biographers say she was his muse. Their relationship was the subject of the 1990's film, "Henry & June." The first piece of writing he sold was an article bought by Liberty magazine, but never published. He tried fiction next for pulp magazines. His more serious writings at that time were "mezzotints," prose-poems that be printed up and his wife sold to customers in restaurants and speakeasies. The idea of fictional autobiography first came to him in 1927, when he diagrammed, in one day, the outline for The Tropics books. Miller toured Europe with his wife for several months in 1928 and 1929, then returned in 1930 alone to settle in Paris. He and June divorced four years later. In Paris, Miller had brief stints as a proofreader for the Paris edition of the "Chicago Tribune" and as a teacher of conventional English. He was also European editor of the "Phoenix," an editor of the "Booster," and a contributing editor of the French review, "Volontes." His first published story was "Mademoiselle Claude," a tribute to Parisian prostitutes that appeared in the "New Revier" in 1931. "Tropic of Cancer," written in 1931 and 1932, was his first published book and related the adventures of himself and low-life friends. During the decades following its publication, "Tropic of Cancer" was frequently smuggled into the United States by American tourists. The first Miller book that any American publisher dared to issue was "The Cosmological Eye," in 1939. "The World of Sex" was issued in the US in 1940, but in a private printing. In 1939, Miller visited Greece, described in "The Colossus of Maroussi," 1941, a travel memoir that remained Miller's personal favorite of all his work. After WW II, Miller returned to the US, arriving in New York in March 1940. After a few months, he began a year-long tour of the country with his painter friend, Abraham Rattner. He recorded this tour in "The Air-Conditioned Nightmare," 1945, and partly in "Remember to Remember," in 1947. Cut off from European royalties during the war, Miller depended on friends and admirers for shelter. In 1942, he settled in California for two years where he became the patriarch of a literary and artistic colony near Big Sur. He described his life there in "Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch," 1956. It was also there that he wrote the three novels of "The Rosy Crucifixion" as well as "Maurizius Forever," 1946, "The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder," 1948, and "Stand Still Like a Mockingbird," 1962. Shortly after he settled at Big Sur in December 1944, Miller married his third wife, Janina Martha Lepska, by whom he had two children, a daughter, Valentin, and a son, Tony. Janina left him in 1951. In 1953, he married Eve McClure, who divorced him in 1962. In 1964, Miller moved to Pacific Palisades, near Los Angeles, to be near his children and escape the tourists of Big Sur. In September 1967, Miller married Hoki Tokuda, a Japanese-born cabaret singer and pianist who was then 32 years old. They later divorced. Eccentric, Miller had an irrational hatred of banks, and couldn't manage the simplest machines, including dial telephones. He has been described as a lifelong anti-Semitic. Affecting him significantly were psychoanalysts Otto Rank and E. Graham Howe. He also had a long relationship with diarist Anais Nin. Miller's recreations included bicycling, painting abstract expressionist pictures, and astrology. He had a love-hate relationship with Conrad Moricand, an astrologer. Miller's "The Red Notebook," 1958, contains information about his horoscope, and during his long life, he consulted astrologers, graphologists, phrenologists and numerologists. He died on 6/07/1980 in Los Angeles, California.. Link to Wikipedia biography