Praise
“The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.” —George Orwell
“American literature today begins and ends with the meaning of what Miller has done.” —Lawrence Durrell
“There is nothing like Henry Miller when he gets rolling. . . . One has to take the English language back to Marlowe and Shakespeare before encountering a wealth of imagery equal in intensity. . . . Nobody has ever written in just this way before, nobody may ever write in this style so well again. A time and a place have come to focus in a writer’s voice. . . . [Miller is] a wildwater of prose, a cataract, a volcano, a torrent, an earthquake, . . . a writer finally like a great athlete, a phenomenon of an avatar of literary energy.” —Norman Mailer
“Miller is more mystic than pornographer. He uses the obscene to shock and to awaken, but once we are awake, he wants to take us to the stars.” —Erica Jong
“Miller is subversive—quite possibly the most honorably, gloriously subversive author who ever lived. . . . He is lyrically reverent about a vision of life which simply includes more than conventional minds can bear.” —Gerald Walker
“That Henry Miller is a great artist, a great American artist, and perhaps the last one we can be proud of—that he is one of the last of our literary giants who rose up during that marvelous period from 1890 to the 1940s—there is no doubt in my mind.” —Maxwell Geismar
“One of the most remarkable, most truly original authors of this or any age.” —Ben Ray Redman, Saturday Review
Darcey Steinke on Henry Miller
I still remember the dilapidated old couch where I finished reading Tropic of Cancer for the first time. It was green, covered with dog hair, and missing a center cushion. Its foam, like chunks of white cake, spilled out from one of the arms. But oh how Miller gave dignity to my on-the-lam life, gave dignity to fucking around, smoking cigarettes, trying to write, and drinking red wine. He even made bedbugs and hunger seem romantic. Unlike Celine, who I also adored, his characters were not bitter. Sure they were broke and homeless, but they liked it that way. He was well outside the numbingly normal, distasteful of American’s greed and dull values, living the life of the spirit. And when I say spirit I do mean the holy one.
Never had I read a writer so unashamed of sex; both his main characters’ corporeal envelope and his myriad love interests were detailed in prose so elegantly coarse that not just particular scenes were eroticized but the whole wide world. From Miller I learned sex can be anything, not just conjugal liaisons and quickies in the bathroom, but also skiffing meals off friends and throwing your shoes into the Seine.
I am older now and not quite as tranced out by Miller’s gritty evocation of boho existence, but his stellar language still scintillates, rhythmic and raw enough to have influenced the whole Beat generation. And even now, forty years after Grove Press’s brave publication of the first American edition, Miller’s Tropic of Cancer illuminates brilliantly in this era of tell-all talk shows and sentimental memoirs, and shows that it’s possible to transcend exposé and forge life’s experiences into the highest of art.
Bibliography of Henry Miller
Tropic of Cancer (1934)
Aller Retour New York (1935)
What Are You Going to Do about Alf? (1935)
Black Spring (1936)
Scenario (1937)
Max and the White Phagocytes (1938)
The Cosmological Eye (1939)
Hamlet (1939)
Tropic of Capricorn (1939)
The World of Sex (1940)
The Wisdom of The Heart (1941)
The Colossus of Maroussi (1941)
Sunday after the War (1944)
Murder the Murderer (1944)
The Angel is My Watermark (1944)
The Plight of the Creative Artist in the United States of America (1944)
Semblance of a Devoted Past (1944)
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945)
Henry Miller Miscellanea (1945)
The Amazing and Invariable Beauford Delaney(1945)
Maurizius Forever (1946)
Of, By and About Henry Miller (1947)
Remember to Remember (1947)
Varda, the Master Builder (1947)
The Smile at the Root of the Ladder (1948)
Sexus (1949)
The Waters Reglitterized (1950)
Rimbaud (1952)
The Books in My Life (1952)
Plexus (1952)
Nights of Love and Laughter (1955)
A Devil in Paradise (1956)
The Time of the Assassins (1956)
Quiet Days in Clichy (1956)
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch(1957)
The Red Notebook (1958)
Art and Outrage (1959)
The Henry Miller Reader (1959)
The Intimate Henry Miller (1959)
To Paint Is to Love Again (1960)
Nexus (1960)
Stand Still Like the Hummingbird (1962)
Joseph Delteil (1962)
The Michael Fraenkel-Henry Miller Correspondence Called Hamlet (1962)
Just Wild about Harry (1963)
A Private Correspondence (1963)
Greece (1964)
Letters to Anais Nin (1965)
The World of Sex (1965)
Rosy Crusifixion (Sexus, Plexus, Nexus) 1965)
Journey to an Antique Land (1965)
Selected Prose (1966)
Insomnia or The Devil at Large (1966)
Order and Chaos Chez Hans Reichel (1966)
Collectors Quest (1968)
Writer and Critic (1968)
Entretiens de Paris avec Georges Belmont (1970)
On Turning Eighty (1972)
My Life and Times (1972)
Reflections on the Death of Mishima (1972)
First Impressions of Greece (1973)
Letters of Henry Miller and Wallace Fowlie (1974)
The Nightmare Notebook (1975)
Flashback (1976)
Gliding Into the Everglades and Other Essays (1976)
The Ineffable Frances Steloff (With A. Nin) (1976)
J’suis pas plus con qu’un autre (1976)
Our America (1976)
Henry Miller’s Book of Friends (1976)
Four Visions of America (1977)
Sextet (1977)
Henry Miller: Years of Trial and Triumph (1978)
Love Between the Sexes (1978)
My Bike and Other Friends (1978)
The Theatre and Other Pieces (1979)
Joey (1979)
The World of Lawrence (1980)
