Henry Miller

In 1941, Henry Miller, the author of Tropic of Cancer, was commissioned by a Los Angeles bookseller to write an erotic novel for a dollar a page. Under the Roofs of Paris (originally published as Opus Pistorum) is that book. Here one finds Miller s characteristic candor, wit, self-mockery, and celebration of the good life. From Marcelle to Tania, to Alexandra, to Anna, and from the Left Bank to Pigalle, Miller sweeps us up in his odyssey in search of the perfect job, the perfect woman, and the perfect experience."

Describes the experiences of two American writers living in Paris and their encounters with French prostitutes

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, The Tropic of Capricorn is now considered a cornerstone of modern literature.

Struggling as a writer amid the bohemianism of 1920s Greenwich Village, well-born Tony Bring must suddenly deal with the knowledge that his beloved wife Hildred has taken her female friend, Vanya, as a lover

The first novel of Miller's frank, autobiographical trilogy uses dream, fantasy, and burlesque to portray the life of a struggling writer in preWorld War I New York

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. Mr. Miller has always been a remarkable creator of character. Conrad Moricand is probably his masterpiece. . . .A Devil in Paradise is the work of a great novelist manqu , a novelist who has no stricter sense of form than the divine creator. . . .Fresh and intoxicating, funny and moving. . ." --The Times Literary Supplement (London)

The delights of his prose are many, not the least of which is Miller's comic irony, which as The London Times noted, can be "as stringent and urgent as Swift's." Frederick Turner has organized the whole to highlight the autobiographical chronology of Miller's life, and along the way places the author squarely where he belongs--in the great tradition of American radical individualism, as a child of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. Miller, who joyously declared "I am interested--like God--only in the individual," would have been pleased. The keynotes here are self-liberation and the pleasures of Miller's "knotty, cross-grained" genius, as Turner describes it--"defying classification, ultimately unamenable to any vision, any program not his] own." Or, as Henry Miller himself put it: "I am the hero and the book is myself."

Prepared by Henry Miller for publication in 1938, Letters to Emil--correspondence from 1921 through 1934 with his boyhood friend and successful artist Emil Schnellock--remained unpublished until 1989. A chance encounter by the two men, out of touch since childhood, led to Miller's decision to become a writer. Throughout the '20s and into the '30s, Schnellock acted as his chief mentor, to whom he voiced his exuberant, sometimes cranky views of life and anxiously discussed his dying marriage to June Mansfield and his growing involvement with Ana s Nin. Miller's letters are a compelling record of the writer in the making, beginning with his first efforts in 1922, tracing his ten-year struggle to find his own voice, and reaching a climax with the publication of Tropic of Cancer in 1934. Indeed, it was in his actual letters to Emil that Henry Miller developed his vigorously earthy yet philosophical style.

"Henry, der Geld brauchte, schlug mir vor, er werde für mich verkäufliche Texte schreiben. Ich bot ihm ein Honorar von einem Dollar pro Seite, dafür erhielt ich alle Rechte ... Ich bezahlte immer bar, wie ausgemacht. Nach wenigen Monaten ergaben die angesammelten Seiten ein komplettes Buch, dem er den Titel OPUS PISTORUM gab" (Milton Luboviski, Buchhändler in Hollywood, 1983 in einer eidesstattlichen Erklärung).
 
 Diese spät entdeckten Erotica des großen Autors sind für Kenner - und nicht nur für diese - eine literarische Sensation.

Auch in diesem inzwischen weltberühmten und verfilmten Buch zeigt sich der unsterbliche Henry Miller als Prophet und Moralist. Jahrelang mußte er auf die Veröffentlichung warten. Denn "Stille Tage in Clichy" ist nicht, wie der Titel vermuten lassen könnte, eine Idylle im Werk des "obszönsten Schriftstellers der Weltliteratur" (Sir Herbert Read). Doch sei es, daß sich sein Erzähler Joey dem Mädchen Nys nähert, das er im Caf? trifft, sei es Mara-Marignan, die sich auf den Champs-?lys?es nach ihm umdreht: Joeys Abenteuer sind von erstaunlicher Heiterkeit. Ganz gleich, ob eine Mutter unter dem Gekreisch ihrer Kinder entblößt wird oder ob Joey mit zwei Dirnen in der Badewanne Brot und Wein zu sich nimmt, fast immer sind seine Handlungen von Gelächter begleitet, gehen unter in wilder Ausgelassenheit. Zugleich beschwört Henry Miller das Paris der dreißiger Jahre und seine Atmosphäre überschäumender Lebenslust.

Mit diesem jahrzehntelang verketzerten und verbotenen Buch fegte der einst verfemte, heute weltberühmte Autor alle tabus hinweg. Es war der erste heftige Angriff gegen eine Gesellschaft, die den Boden bereitet, auf dem das Laster gedeiht. Es schlug die entscheidende Bresche in eine Mauer von Heuchelei und Prüderie.

A “melo-melo in seven scenes,” Just Wild About Harry is Henry Miller’s only excursion into playwriting. Harry is pure Miller, welling up from the same abundant love of life and freedom from convention that made its author the dean of writers dedicated to human liberation. Admittedly inspired by lonesco and the Theatre of the Absurd, Miller’s tragicomic slapstick is nevertheless as American as the Marx Brothers and the blues––the simple story of a heartless Harry (the one the ladies are wild about) who learns a bittersweet lesson about life, death, and love. Begun in Europe in 1960, Just Wild About Harry was first published by New Directions in 1963.

Das erzählerische Kabinettstück Henry Millers: Die Geschichte vom Clown, der sich nicht damit zufriedengeben mag, die Leute zum Lachen zu bringen, sondern ihnen Glückseligkeit schenken will. Ein seltener Glücksfall künstlerischen Zusammenwirkens: den poetischen Traum Henry Millers illustrieren die Blätter von Joan Mir?.

Der Autor der vielumstrittenen "Wendekreis"-Bücher bekennt sich hier mit leidenschaftlicher Diesseitsfrömmigkeit zu einem Leben fern aller Zivilisation, in ursprünglichem Einverständnis von Mensch und Natur, wie er selbst es lange Jahre in bizarrer Einöde an der kalifornischen Küste im Kreise von Künstlern, Intellektuellen und gleichgesinnten Originalen verwirklichte.

Henry Millers berühmtes Griechenland-Buch entstand 1940, nachdem er im Jahr zuvor fünf Reisemonate in dem mythenträchtigen Land verbracht hatte. Ein faszinierender Erfahrungsbericht, in dem die archaische Landschaft, die Welt der klassischen Mythen von der wilden Phantasie Millers neu belebt und durchtränkt wird. Zugleich liest sich sein Buch als das Dokument eines Reinigungsprozesses, an dessen Ende Miller etwas von der Heimat und dem Frieden erfährt, den zu finden sein ruheloser Geist ausgezogen war.

Some writers attempt to conceal the literary influences which have shaped their thinking--but not Henry Miller. 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 Dostoeyvsky, 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.

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