Exceptional, excitant, anti-excrescent, ludicrously excursive, expatriate exemplar. This is Henry Miller in an ill-fitting nutshell. Born on December 26, 1890 to a middle class gentile family in Brooklyn, Miller played out his formative years on the rough and tumble streets of East New York. He later dubbed this: "the street of early sorrows." Working odd jobs and associating with people of all races, religions, colors, and creeds (when this was a very un-gentile thing to do), Miller never had a conformist atom in his body-- And if he did, it burst when he dropped out of City College of New York after two months of reading Edmund Spencer's "Faerie Queen." He got his kickstart when working at one of his various jobs, where he began copying and commenting on passages from Nietzsche's "The Anti-Christ." He was over thirty years old before he had written a word. Time came when, after one failed marriage which left him with a child, and in the midst another failing marriage to the enigmatic June Smith ("Mona" of his "Rosy Crucifixion" Trilogy), he simply picked up-or rather, dropped everything-and left America to live in Paris. In Paris he lives in the working class neighborhood known as Clichy, begging for food and entertaining aristocrats for money and meals. He meets Anais Nin who donates money, writing materials, and a passionate heart, helping Miller to complete his brilliant and tortured first novel, Tropic of Cancer. He stays in Paris for ten years, living what many think of as a "Bohemian" lifestyle, but one he would simply call "happy." In fact, one year after he leaves Paris to stay in Greece indefinitely, he is dubbed by the famous British writer Lawrence Durrell as "the Happy Rock." Forced to leave Europe and return to America, he moves to Big Sur in California after a three year journey across the U.S., which produced "The Air-Conditioned Nightmare." Perpetually galvanized, and always emotional (if he never had a conformist atom in his body, he never had a subtle one either), he marries a third wife, then divorces; a fourth wife, then divorces; a fifth wife, then divorces. Developing a reputation as a pornographer instead of an explorer of the deeply human, or the "wonders of the mundane," he has, at least for a time, almost all of his books either banned or expurgated in many countries, even (or I should say, especially) in his homeland. He continues to write until his death at age 90, living out his final but by no means miserable last days in Pacific Palisades.

Always shocking and always unconventional, Miller never considered himself a writer of literature. In fact, he rallied against the very idea of literature and spearheaded an assault on Clasiccism that still reverberates throughout modern and post-modern literature. He set fire to "old decrepit idols," and saw himself as, figuratively, filling a position left open by the death of Nietzsche as the "Anti-Christ," "The devaluer of all values." One can see that his reception by the overly pious and puritanical public of the time was bound to be less than welcoming. This he expected. He was always aware of how untimely he was, and he surely had a keen sense of the Nietzsche-ism: "Some are born posthumously." Through numerous hardships, extreme poverty, near starvation, and not a thread to hang on to, one would expect Miller to fit neatly into the Existentialist clique that exploded on to the scene around the time Miller was leaving Europe. At one time or another, he might have. But no evidence for this can be found in his writings, which always manage to convey the joy of living "life at the limits," rather than the despair it so often occasions. Backed by a militia of the most eccentric writers in history, Miller's models are Nietzsche, Spengler, Lawrence, Rimbaud, Faure, Krishnamurti, and Whitman. Though these people all meshed to form his literary lodestar, he managed to carry the torch further and plunge deeper into the malaise and profundity of life, in all of its simplicity, than any writer before him. He found happiness under every rock, every corpse, and every tarred piece of dung that life could proffer. Hence, the Rosy Crucifixion. Indeed, you don't read Miller, you don't study him, you won't find his work in textbooks or courses neatly packaged for quick and easy digestibility. You talk to him, he talks to you (never at you), and all that can be done is to just stop fighting, sit back and enjoy the chit-chat. So what if this conversation costs you 15 bucks. Miller gives you something priceless.

Books in publication include Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, The Rosy Crucifixion (Sexus, Plexus, Nexus), The Colossus of Maroussi, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Black Spring, Big Sur and The Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, Time of the Assassins, Aller Retour New York, The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder, The Wisdom of the Heart, From Your Capricorn Friend, Just Wild about Harry, Moloch: or This Gentile World, Crazy Cock, The World of Lawrence: A Passionate Appreciation, and The Books In My Life. ~CHRIS