About the Author

Henry Miller (1891—1980) was one of the most controversial American novelists during his lifetime. His book, The Tropic of Cancer, was banned in the some U.S. states before being overruled by the Supreme Court. New Directions publishes several of his books.

Reviews

"Henry Miller is the nearest thing to Céline America has produced .... He aims not at the ears, brains or consciences, but at the viscera and solar plexus."
*New Leader*

"No one ever embraced life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness more lustily."
*Pico Iyer - TIME*

"Here is an artist who re-establishes the potency of illusion by gaping out at the open wounds, by courting the stern, psychological reality which man seeks to avoid through recourse to the oblique symbolism of art."
*Anaïs Nin*

"I think he’s the greatest American writer."
*Bob Dylan*

"The only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past."
*George Orwell*

"It is difficult not to admire a writer who has so resolutely gone about his own business in his own way without the slightest concession to any fashion."
*Gore Vidal*

"The people that banned words in books didn't stop people from buying those books. If you couldn't buy Henry Miller in the early sixties, you could go to Paris or England. We used to go to Paris, and everybody would buy Henry Miller books because they were banned, and everybody saw them, all the students had them. I don't believe words can harm you."
*John Lennon*

"I suspect that Henry Miller’s final place will be among those towering anomalies of authorship like Whitman or Blake who have left us, not simply works of art, but a corpus of ideas which motivate and influence a whole cultural pattern. "
*Lawrence Durrell*

"American literature today begins and ends with the meaning of what Miller has done."
*Lawrence Durrell*

"What makes Miller distinctive among modern writers is his ability to combine, without confusion, the aesthetic and prophetic functions. Realization, one might imagine, is such a disinterested process that the result would be the purely objective naturalism of a Madame Bovary. But Flaubert’s limitations have become somewhat obvious of later, and though his method is perfect as far as it goes, Miller is aware that it must be carried much farther, into the realm of ideas, and that the writer must not be afraid to declare his ideals. Miller’s ideals I find very acceptable—they are the ideals of what I call anarchism."
*Sir Herbert Read*

"There is an eager vitality and exuberance to the writing which is exhilarating; a rush of spirit into the world as though all the sparkling wines have been uncorked at once; we watchfully hear the language skip, whoop and wheel across Miller’s page."
*William H. Gass*