
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. He broke with existing literary forms and developed a new type of semi-autobiographical novel that blended character study, social criticism, philosophical reflection, stream of consciousness, explicit language, sex, surrealist free association, and mysticism. His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn, and the trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion, which are based on his experiences in New York City and Paris (all of which were banned in the United States until 1961). He also wrote travel memoirs and literary criticism, and painted watercolors.
Sexus is the first volume of the scandalous trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion, Henry Miller's major life workHenry Miller called the end of his life in America and the start of a new, bohemian existence in 1930s Paris his 'rosy crucifixion'. His searing fictionalized autobiography of this time of liberation was banned for nearly twenty years. Sexus, the first volume in The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, looks back to his early sexual escapades in Brooklyn, and his growing infatuation with the playful, teasing dance hall hostess who will become the great obsession of his life.
Some of the most rewarding pages in Henry Miller's books concern his self-education as a writer. He tells, as few great writers ever have, how he set his goals, how he discovered the excitement of using words, how the books he read influenced him, and how he learned to draw on his own experience.
Now hailed as an American classic Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller’s masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in modern literature, permitted the publication of this first volume of Miller’s famed mixture of memoir and fiction, which chronicles with unapologetic gusto the bawdy adventures of a young expatriate writer, his friends, and the characters they meet in Paris in the 1930s. Tropic of Cancer is now considered, as Norman Mailer said, "one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century."
Banned in America for almost thirty years because of its explicit sexual content, this companion volume to Miller's Tropic of Cancer chronicles his life in 1920s New York City. Famous for its frank portrayal of life in Brooklyn's ethnic neighborhoods, and Miller's outrageous sexual exploits, Tropic of Capricorn is now considered a cornerstone of modern literature.
This tender and nostalgic work dates from the same period as Tropic of Cancer (1934). It is a celebration of love, art, and the Bohemian life at a time when the world was simpler and slower, and Miller an obscure, penniless young writer in Paris. Whether discussing the early days of his long friendship with Alfred Perles or his escapades at the Club Melody brothel, in Quiet Days in Clichy Miller describes a period that would shape his entire life and oeuvre.
Continuing the subversive self-revelation begun in Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, Henry Miller takes readers along a mad, free-associating journey from the damp grime of his Brooklyn youth to the sun-splashed cafes and squalid flats of Paris. With incomparable glee, Miller shifts effortlessly from Virgil to venereal disease, from Rabelais to Roquefort. In this seductive technicolor swirl of Paris and New York, he captures like no one else the blending of people and the cities they inhabit.
The Colossus of Maroussi is an impressionist travelogue by Henry Miller, written in 1939 and first published in 1941 by Colt Press of San Francisco. As an impoverished writer in need of rejuvenation, Miller travelled to Greece at the invitation of his friend, the writer Lawrence Durrell. The text is inspired by the events that occurred. The text is ostensibly a portrait of the Greek writer George Katsimbalis, although some critics have opined that is more of a self-portrait of Miller himself. Miller considered it to be his greatest work.
Second volume in the Rosy Crucifixion series. More about Henry and June, also chronicling the author's travels to the deep South, and his work as an encyclopedia salesmen (after he'd left personnel).
Nexus is the third volume of the scandalous trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion, Henry Miller's major life workThe exhilarating final volume of Henry Miller's semi-autobiographical trilogy, Nexus follows his last months in New York. Trapped in a bizarre ménage-à-trois with his fiery wife Mona and her lover Stasia, he finds his life descending into chaos. Finally, betrayed and exhausted, he decides to leave America and sail for Paris, to discover his true vocation as a writer.
Whence Henry Miller's title for this, one of his most appealing books; first published in 1957, it tells the story of Miller's life on the Big Sur, a section of California coast where he lived for fifteen years.Big Sur is the portrait of a place one of the most colorful in the U.S. and of the extraordinary people Miller knew there: writers (and writers who didn't write), mystics seeking truth in meditation (and the not-so-saintly looking for sex-cults or celebrity), sophisticated children and adult innocents; geniuses, cranks and the unclassifiable.Henry Miller writes with a buoyancy and brimming energy that are infectious. He has a fine touch for comedy. But this is also a serious book the testament of a free spirit who has broken through the restraints and cliches of modern life to find within himself his own kind of paradise.
In 1939, after ten years as an expatriate, Henry Miller returned to the United States with a keen desire to see what his native land was really like—to get to the roots of the American nature and experience. He set out on a journey that was to last three years, visiting many sections of the country and making friends of all descriptions. The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is the result of that odyssey.
Durata: 1 ora e 9 min"Questa è la sola storia vera che io abbia raccontato fino adesso," dice Miller nell'epilogo scritto per questo bellissimo racconto. Un'affermazione strana perché si tratta forse della sua unica storia di fantasia pura. Ma Miller chiarisce: "I miei personaggi sono tutti reali, presi dalla vita, dalla mia vita, mentre Augusto è l'unico che nasce dal regno della fantasia. Ma che cos'è questo regno della fantasia che ci circonda e assedia da ogni parte, se non la realtà stessa?".Nella storia di Augusto, il clown geniale e disperato che recita ogni sera "il dramma dell'iniziazione e del martirio", Miller ha voluto parlare del vero artista e del suo faticoso percorso. "Il sorriso ai piedi della scala", poetica e geniale biografia immaginaria di clown richiestagli da Fernand Léger, influenzata dai meravigliosi quadri sul circo di Rouault, Miró, Chagall, Seurat e Max Jacob, è stato scritto nel 1947-48, un periodo di trasformazione profonda nell'opera milleriana, negli stessi anni di "Plexus" e di "I libri della mia vita", ed è anche un'introduzione alle opere della maturità.‟Ai piedi d'una scala tesa verso la luna, Augusto si sedeva in contemplazione, fisso il sorriso, perduti lontano i pensieri. Questa simulazione d'estasi, che egli aveva portato a perfezione, faceva sempre una grande impressione sul pubblico: pareva il sommo della stravaganza.”©2016 Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore S.r.l. Tradotto da Valerio Riva (P)2018 Audible Studios
“Dios sabe que llevo ya bastante tiempo viviendo en París como para asombrarme de algo. Aquí no hace falta ir buscando aventuras a propósito, como en Nueva York. . . basta con tener un poco de paciencia y esperar, la vida te sale al encuentro en los lugares más recónditos e increíbles, aquí te pasan cosas.” Así empieza este texto inédito de Henry Miller , de cuya existencia nadie tenía conocimiento hasta que inesperadamente, el 10 de marzo de 1983, un antiguo librero de Hollywood, Milton Luboviski, se personó en la Embajada de los estados Unidos en París con el fin de declarar bajo juramento en qué circunstancias él mimo había encargado a Henry Miller la redacción de lo que, más tarde, sería Opus pistorum . En 1914, Luboviski, además de otros libros curiosos y especiales, empezó a vender en su librería narrativa erótica, a la que se mostraron muy aficionados grandes directores de cine como Joseph Mankiewicz y Billy Wilder, entre otros. No debían irle de maravilla las cosas a Miller cuando aceptó escribir para su amigo Luboviski, por un dólar la página, las peripecias de la muy cachonda vida parisina de un probable doble suyo, quien, con adolescentes intensidad y constancia, persigue obstinadamente a la mujer y la cópula perfectas. Miller iba entregando páginas y más páginas a Luboviski, quien se la pagaba, según lo convenido, al contado. Cuando Miller le llevó las últimas a mediados de 1942, le dijo : “Aquí tienes el final del libro. Espero que te dé para varios meses de alquiler”. Por lo visto, le dio para bastante más tiempo… El caso es que, desde que se dio a conocer, Opus pistorum ha hecho correr ya mucha tinta en la prensa mundial. Su publicación, tanto en los Estados Unidos como en Europa, fue precedida de toda suerte de especulaciones y escándalos. Ahora, finalmente, también los fans hispanoparlantes de Henry Miller podrán “descubrir” a su admirado autor en el audaz y pintoresco lenguaje de este libro, en cierto modo revelador de las fantasías eróticas primarias de un escritor considerado hoy como uno de los autores de nuestro siglo más destacados precisamente en este género, el erótico.
One of Henry Miller's most luminous statements of his personal philosophy of life, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, provides a symbolic title for this collection of stories and essays. Many of them have appeared only in foreign magazines while others were printed in small limited editions which have gone out of print. Miller's genius for comedy is at its best in "Money and How It Gets That Way" -- a tongue-in-cheek parody of "economics" provoked by a postcard from Ezra Pound which asked if he "ever thought about money." His deep concern for the role of the artist in society appears in "An Open Letter to All and Sundry," and in "The Angel is My Watermark" he writes of his own passionate love affair with painting. "The Immorality of Morality" is an eloquent discussion of censorship. Some of the stories, such as "First Love," are autobiographical, and there are portraits of friends, such as "Patchen: Man of Anger and Light," and essays on other writers such as Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Sherwood Anderson and Ionesco.Taken together, these highly readable pieces reflect the incredible vitality and variety of interests of the writer who extended the frontiers of modern literature with Tropic of Cancer and other great books.
The social function of the creative personality is a recurrent theme with Henry Miller, and this book is perhaps his most poignant and concentrated analysis of the artist's dilemma.
The devil in Henry Miller's Big Sur paradise is Conrad Moricand: A friend of his Paris days, who, having been financed and brought over from Europe as an act of mercy by Mr. Miller, turns out as exacting, sponging, evil, cunning and ungrateful a guest as can be found in contemporary literature.
In 1930 Henry Miller moved from New York to Paris, leaving behind — at least temporarily — his tempestuous marriage to June Smith and a novel that had sprung from his anguish over her love affair with a mysterious woman named Jean Kronski. Begun in 1927, Crazy Cock is the story of Tony Bring, a struggling writer whose bourgeois inclinations collide with the disordered bohemianism of his much-beloved wife, Hildred, particularly when her lover, Vanya, comes to live with them in their already cramped Greenwich Village apartment. In a world swirling with violence, sex, and passion, the three struggle with their desires, inching ever nearer to insanity, each unable to break away from this dangerous and consuming love triangle.
Some writers attempt to conceal the literary influences which have shaped their thinking––but not Henry Miller. In this unique work, he gives an utterly candid and self-revealing account of the reading he did during his formative years. In The Books in My Life he shares the thrills of discovery that many kinds of books have brought to a keenly curious and questioning mind. Some of Miller's favorite writers are the giants whom most of us revere––authors such as Dostoievsky, Boccaccio, Walt Whitman, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Lao-Tse. To them he brings fresh and penetrating insights. But many are lesser-known figures: Krishnamurti, the prophet-sage; the French contemporaries Blaise Cendrars and Jean Giono; Richard Jeffries, who wrote The Story of My Heart ; the Welshman John Cowper Powys; and scores of others. The Books in My Life contains some fine autobiographical chapters, too. Miller describes his boyhood in Brooklyn, when he devoured the historical stories of G. A. Henty and the romances of Rider Haggard. He tells of the men and women whom he regards as "living books": Lou Jacobs, W. E. B. DuBois, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and others. He offers his reminiscences of the New York Theatre in the early 1900's––including plays such as Alias Jimmy Valentine and Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model . And finally, in Miller's best vein of humor, he provides a satiric chapter on bathroom reading. In an appendix, Miller lists the hundred books that have influenced him most.
In The World of Sex, Henry Miller, one of the most scandalous writers of the 20th century explains his literary project Henry Miller's bold, explicit novels scandalized readers and remade the literature of his day. In this uncompromising literary manifesto he argues that sex is at the heart of his writing because it is at the heart of life - a vital force as essential as bread, money, work or play. Drawing on his own experiences and on the writing of his famously banned novels in Paris, he shows sex as a mysterious realm that must be explored if we are to be truly free.
Ayrıksı bir yazardan ayrıksı bir kitap... Henry Miller yirminci yüzyılın başkaldırıcı yazarlarından. Kapitalizmi reddederken sosyalizmi efendi değiştirme olarak gördü. Anarşizmi Amerikan "doğaya dönüş" geleneğiyle, Beat Kuşağı ve "çiçek çocuklar" ile ilişkilendirilen Miller, Yitik Kuşak içinde de sayılmaz. Miller'ın Uykusuzluk'ta (Insomnia) sözünü ettiği Japon kadın, 1967'de yetmiş altı yaşındayken tanışıp aşık olduğu kabare sanatçısı Hoki Tokuda. Yine bu dönemde yaptığı suluboya resimler de kendi resimleri arasında özel bir bölümü, Insomnia Dizisi'ni oluşturur.. "Henry mitolojik bir yaratığa benziyor. Yazıları ateşli, yıldırım gibi, girift, hain ve tehlikeli. 'Çağımızın şiddete gereksinimi var.' "Yazdıklarının gücünü, o günahtan arındırıcı, yıkıcı, gözüpek, korkunç gücünü seviyorum. Yaşama duyulan hayranlığın, coşkunun, her şeye olan tutkulu ilginin, enerjinin, taşkınlığın, gülüşün ve ansızın patlayan fırtınaların bu tuhaf karışımı aklımı başımdan alıyor. Her şey silinip süpürülü ikiyüzlülük, korku, basitlik, yalancılık. İçgüdünün ortaya konması bu. Birinci tekil kişiyi, gerçek adları kullanıyor; düzenden biçimden hatta kurmacadan bile nefret ediyor." - Anais Nin
An essential collection of writings, bursting with Henry Miller’s exhilarating candor and wisdomIn this selection of stories and essays, Henry Miller elucidates, revels, and soars, showing his command over a wide range of moods, styles, and subject matters. Writing “from the heart,” always with a refreshing lack of reticence, Miller involves the reader directly in his thoughts and feelings. “His real aim,” Karl Shapiro has written, “is to find the living core of our world whenever it survives and in whatever manifestation, in art, in literature, in human behavior itself. It is then that he sings, praises, and shouts at the top of his lungs with the uncontainable hilarity he is famous for.”Here are some of Henry Miller’s best-known writings: an essay on the photographer Brassai; Reflections on Writing, in which Miller examines his own position as a writer; Seraphita and Balzac and His Double, on the works of other writers; and The Alcoholic Veteran, Creative Death, The Enormous Womb, and The Philosopher Who Philosophizes.
Henry Miller's Rosy Crucifixion, his second major trilogy, took more than 10 years for the author to complete. Beginning in 1949 with Sexus, a work so controversial all of Paris was abuzz with L'Affaire Miller, (and publisher Maurice Girodias saw himself threatened with jail), following in 1952 with Plexus, and finally concluding with 1959's Nexus, the three works are a dazzling array of scenes, sexual encounters and ideas, covering Miller's final days in NY, his relationship with June Miller and her lover, his take on the arts, his favorite writers, his thoughts, his insights, his days and his nights, finally ending with a glorious farewell to the life he'd known and an anticipation of the life he would lead.
This collection, first published by New Directions in 1939, contains a number of Henry Miller's most important shorter prose writings. They are taken from the Paris books Black Spring (1936) and Max and the White Phagocytes (1938) and were for the most part, written at about the satire time as Tropic of Capricorn ―the period of Miller’s and Durrell’s life in the famous Villa Seurat in Paris.As is usual with Miller, these pieces cannot be tagged with the label of any given literary category. The unforgettable portrait of Max, the Paris drifter, and the probably-autobiographical Tailor Shop , are basically short stories, but even here the irrepressible vitality of Miller’s personality keeps breaking into the narrative. And in the critical and philosophical essays, the prose poems and surrealist fantasies, the travel sketches and scenarios, Miller’s passion for fiction, for telling the endless story of his extraordinary life, cannot be held down. Life, as no other modern author has lived it or can write it, bursts from these pages―the life of the mind and the body; of people, places and things; of ideas and the imagination.
Aller Retour New York is truly vintage Henry Miller, written during his most creative period, between Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). Aller Retour New York is truly vintage Henry Miller, written during his most creative period, between Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). Miller always said that his best writing was in his letters, and this unbuttoned missive to his friend Alfred Perles is not only his longest (nearly 80 pages!) but his best―an exuberant, rambling, episodic, humorous account of his visit to New York in 1935 and return to Europe aboard a Dutch ship. Despite its high repute among Miller devotees, Aller Retour New York has never been easy to find. It was first brought out in Paris in 1935 in a limited edition, and a second edition, “Printed for Private Circulation Only,” was issued in the United States ten years later. It is now available in paperback as a Revived Modern Classic, with an introduction by George Wickes that illuminates the people and personal circumstances which inform Aller Retour New York.
In 1958, when Henry Miller was elected to membership in the American Institute of Arts and Letters, the citation described him as: "The veteran author of many books whose originality and richness of technique are matched by the variety and daring of his subject matter. His boldness of approach and intense curiosity concerning man and nature are unequalled in the prose literature of our times." It is most fitting that this anthology of "the best" of Henry Miller should have been assembled by one of the first among Miller's contemporaries to recognize his genius, the eminent British writer Lawrence Durrell. Drawing material from a dozen different books Durrell has traced the main line and principal themes of the "single, endless autobiography" which is Henry Miller's life work. "I suspect," writes Durrell in his Introduction, "that 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." Earlier, H. L. Mencken had said, "his is one of the most beautiful prose styles today," and the late Sir Herbert Read had written that "what makes Miller distinctive among modern writers is his ability to combine, without confusion, the aesthetic and prophetic functions." Included are stories, "portraits" of persons and places, philosophical essays, and aphorisms. For each selection Miller himself prepared a brief commentary which fits the piece into its place in his life story. This framework is supplemented by a chronology from Miller's birth in 1891 up to the spring of 1959, a bibliography, and, as an appendix, an open letter to the Supreme Court of Norway written in protest of the ban on Sexus, a part of which appears in this volume.
La literatura norteamericana cuenta con una buena nómina de “autores malditos” y Henry Miller ocupa los puestos de cabeza.” José Antonio Gurpegui (El Cultural). “A pesar de ser el gran vagabundo de la literatura, no necesitará buscar lectores entre nuestros nietos, los tiene asegurados.” Lawrence Durrell. Con su clásico afán provocativo, Henry Miller repasa ese hábito extraño, compulsivo y ya ni siquiera inconfesable, que todo lector febril ha practicado: leer en el retrete. En nuestra reverente adoración de la lectura, la llevamos con nosotros a lugares que no parecen muy aptos, precisamente, para la reverencia. Ésa es la contradicción que atrae la mirada de francotirador de Miller. En un texto vitriólico, divertido y punzante, aprovecha para arremeter contra toda noción de la lectura que –ya sea por su exceso de solemnidad o, al contrario, por la búsqueda de mero entretenimiento renuncie a la sagrada experiencia de la intensidad total. Y en páginas de una enorme belleza nos anima a perseverar en la busca del texto que todos anhelamos leer: aquel que un día escribimos en sueños y de inmediato olvidamos. Enrique de Hériz.
Forty years have passed since Grove Press first published Henry Miller's landmark masterpiece -- an act that would forever change the face of American literature. Initially banned in America as obscene, Tropic of Cancer was first published in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards permitted its publication. Tropic of Cancer is now considered, as Norman Mailer said, "one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century." Also banned in America for almost thirty years, Tropic of Capricorn is now considered a cornerstone of modern literature. Together, Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn are a lasting testament to one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century and his contribution not only to literature but to the cause of free speech.
Uncovered along with Crazy Cock in 1988 by Miller biographer Mary V. Dearborn, Moloch emerged from the misery of Miller's years at Western Union and from the squalor of his first marriage. Set in the rapidly changing New York City of the early twenties, its hero is the rough-and-tumble Dion Moloch, a man filled with anger and despair. Trapped in a demeaning job, oppressed by an acrimonious home life, Moloch escapes to the streets only to be assaulted by a world he despises even more — a Brooklyn transformed into a shrill medley of ethnic sights, sounds, and smells. The antagonized Moloch strikes out blindly at everything he hates, battling against a world whose hostility threatens to overwhelm and destroy him.
Excelente libro en el que el autor norteamericano homenajea a todos aquellos amigos que habían sido fundamentales en su vida. La mayoría eran seres anónimos, seres de la calle que no pertenecían a los ambientes culturales. Sólo algunas de sus amistades podrían catalogarse como conocidas, entre éstas, estarían sin duda los escritores Lawrence Durelll y Anaïs Nin.