Background
Henry Valentine Miller was born on December 26, 1891, in the Yorkville section of New York City to Heinrich Miller and Louise
Marie Nieting, second generation Americans of German ancestry. He was raised in Brooklyn where the family moved after his
first year. After graduating from high school in 1909, Miller entered City College of New York, but, unable to comform to
the academic routine, left after only two months. Over the next ten years, he travelled throughout the Southwest; married
the first of his five wives, pianist Beatrice Wickens; and worked at an assortment of odd jobs before becoming employment
manager of the messenger department at Western Union Telegraph Company in New York City in 1920. His first unpublished work
"Clipped Wings," written in 1922, is based on his experiences there. By 1924, Miller had decided to leave Western Union and
devote his energies entirely to writing. Supported by his second wife, dancer June Smith, he spent several lean years in New
York writing for pulp magazines and peddling his prose poems door-to-door. A 1928-1929 European tour persuaded him to pursue
his career abroad; and, in 1930, Miller left the United States for Paris, where he lived until 1939. The Paris years marked
a decisive decade in Miller's writing career. His first published story, "Mademoiselle Claude," appeared in a 1931 issue of
the New Review; and, by the end of the following year, Miller had completed Tropic of Cancer, his largely autobiographical
account of life in Paris. The novel was published in 1934 by Jack Kahane's Obelisk Press; followed, in 1936, by Black Spring
and, in 1939, by Tropic of Capricorn. During this period Miller was surrounded by literary and artistic friends, including
Hungarian photographer Brassai, painter Hans Reichel, and writers Anais Nin, Walter Lowenfels, Michael Fraenkel, and Alfred
Perles. It was also at this time that his interest in astrology was stimulated by a meeting by a meeting with Swiss-French
astrologer Conrad Moricund. In 1939, at the invitation of novelist Lawrence Durrell, Miller left Paris for a prolonged vacation
in Greece -- an experience which inspired The Colossus of Maroussi (1941) -- but, with outbreak of World War II, he was forced
to return to the United States in 1940. Following a twelve-month American tour, described in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
(1945), Miller, in 1942, moved to California. Two years later, he settled permanently on the coast at Big Sur where, over
the next two decades, there grew up around him the artistic/literary colony depicted in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous
Bosch (1956). During this period -- living first with his third wife Janina Martha Lepska and their two children, and later
with his fourth wife Eve McClure -- Miller revived his passion for painting with watercolors, renewed his acquaintance with
astrologer Moricund, pursued his facination with Rimbaud, and resumed his autobiographical writings with the Rosy Crucifixion
trilogy. The three volumes, Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus, were published in Paris in 1949, 1953, and 1959 respectively. In 1958,
at a time when most of his writings were still banned in the United States, Miller was made a member of the National Institute
of Arts and Letters. The next year, Barney Rosset of Grove Press approached him to secure the American rights to the Tropic
books; and, in 1961, Cancer was finally published in the United States (Capricorn followed in 1962 and Black Spring in 1963).
The printings provolked a series of obscenity suits, but the Supreme Court, in a 1964 decision, affirmed their right of publication.
An American edition of the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy appeared soon after in 1965. Miller had, by this time, already left Big
Sur, moving south to Pacific Palisades to be near his children and to escape the steady flow of visitors to his home. Here
he married his fifth wife, Japanese jazz singer Hiroko Tokude, in 1965. Miller died in PAcific Palisades on June 7, 1980 at
the age of 88.