Henry Miller: A Brief Biography

The prolific author, essayist, and painter Henry Miller was born in Manhattan, New York on December 26, 1891, and spent most of his childhood in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, known then as the Fourteenth Ward. He attended The City College of New York, CUNY for a single semester in 1909, though in his own words, he "rebelled against [their] educational methods." He then began to work various jobs, one with Atlas Portland Cement Company in New York, another as a ranch hand in the "West" and then again in New York as a tailor. In 1917, he married Beatrice Sylvas Wickens, a pianist, with whom he had a daughter, Barbara Sylvas, two years later. In 1920, he began working for Western Union; it was here that Miller began to work on his first novel, Clipped Wings, a fictionalized account of his time at Western Union (the novel remains unpublished). In 1924, having fallen in love with June Smith, a taxi dancer, he divorced his first wife to marry her. He also quit his job, determined to write full-time. He spent the next few years writing (the posthumously published Moloch and Crazy Cock) and touring Europe, subsisting largely on loans and gifts from friends. In 1928, he began creating watercolor paintings, which would become a lifelong avocation, and be the subject of many public exhibitions. He and June met the writer Anaïs Nin in Paris in 1931; she would become Miller's muse, critic, and lover as he worked on a new novel, Tropic of Cancer. This book, in its published form, was marked by a non-linear narrative and a first-person stream of consciousness style, which was markedly different from his earlier efforts. It also lacked a plot in the conventional sense: it was a meditation on his memories and experiences of his life, particularly his life in Paris and New York. As such, it included graphic sexual encounters, though this was not the main matter of the book. Much of his subsequent work would contain similar first-person stream of consciousness accounts of various aspects of his life.

In 1934, as June's divorce of Henry-requested the previous year-became final, Miller's watershed Tropic of Cancer was published in Paris. It was subsequently banned in the United States and the United Kingdom because it was deemed obscene. Over the next few years, magazines would publish his work with increasing regularity, and as the novels Black Spring and Tropic of Capricorn (also banned in the U.S.)were published, he began to meet other writers, such as Lawrence Durrell, and poets, such as T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas. Miller's literary reputation began to grow as people, many of them soldiers returning from World War II, began to smuggle his books into the U.S., but he remained severely impoverished.

He continued to tour Europe, writing throughout the forties the manuscripts, which would become The Colussus of Maroussi, The World of Sex, and Quiet Days in the Clichy (the original manuscript of which would later be lost). He also moved to Big Sur and married Janina Lepska at the end of the year. He kept painting and he kept writing - Sexus (the beginning of his acclaimed Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, finished in 1945), Into the Nightlife (1947), The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder (1948), Plexus (1949), and The Books in My Life (1951). He divorced Janina in 1952 and embarked on another trip to Europe the following year, at the end of which he married Eve McClure in California. Throughout the rest of the decade, he continued to write (Nexus, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, and rewritten versions of both Quiet Days in the Clichy and The World of Sex), was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and continued to exhibit his paintings in Europe and Asia.

In 1961, spurred by the successes of the risqué Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover, Grove Press published Tropic of Cancer in the U.S. to great sales. This led to an obscenity trial in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the book's (and Tropic of Capricorn, published in 1962) publication three years later. This landmark ruling established what is known as the Miller test-a three-part standard for determining obscenity; it is also considered one of the events that helped trigger the cultural and sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies. During this time, Miller would divorce Eve McClure, and see U.S. publication of Black Spring. He would also, unfortunately, be pilloried and assailed in the mainstream media as a pornographer, and among many of the literary press as an avant-garde writer focused on sex. This would lead to many visits from unwanted guests, strangers eager to meet him to satisfy their prurient curiosity.

Throughout the sixties and seventies, Miller wrote less frequently, as his unpublished manuscripts saw publication, and films were made of his work. He began to paint more often, and in 1967, married Japanese singer Hiroki Tokuda, who left him by the mid-seventies. He died in his home in the Pacific Palisades section of California on June 7, 1980, leaving behind a huge body of work that influenced writers as diverse in style and content as Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, and Erica Jong.

Sources

Henry Miller, About Henry, The Henry Miller Library (originally published in My Life and Times by Henry Miller in 1972)

dwim, Henry Miller, Literary Kicks

RC, June - A Biography, Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company: A Henry Miller Blog

Garan Holcombe, Tropic of Cancer, The Literary Encyclopedia

Jeffrey Miller, Fred Dycus Miller, Freedom of speech, Google Book Search, page 88

Author unknown, Miller, Henry, Literary Traveler

Wendy Moss, Henry Miller (1891-1980), Bohemian Ink

Author unknown, Biography of Henry Miller (1891-1980), GradeSaver