Henry Miller

Henry Miller was born in 1891 in Manhattan’s ethnically German Yorkville neighborhood. Miller’s parents were German Lutheran emigrants. While Miller was still young, his family moved to Brooklyn, where he primarily grew up. Miller married Beatrice Wickens in 1917, with whom he had one daughter before divorcing in 1923. During this period he lived in Brooklyn and worked at Western Union. He began writing, quitting his job in 1924 to focus on it. Around this time he also struck up a relationship with 21-year-old June Mansfield, whom he married and lived with for three years, until she left for Paris with her suspected lesbian lover, Jean Kronski. In 1930, Miller moved to Paris, where he lived for a decade. During this time, he worked at a newspaper, embraced the bohemian literary scene, and published his first books. From his 1934 debut with Tropic of Cancer onward, Miller consistently attracted massive controversy for the graphic sexual content of his works. He won praise and regard from the leading literary figures of the day, yet his books were for decades banned in his native United States (being labelled pornography) and had to be smuggled into the country. After a brief stint in Greece, Miller returned to the U.S. in the early 1940s, heading to California and eventually settling in Big Sur. There he lived for his last four decades, continuing to write and getting married and divorced several times. By the time of his death in 1980, his subversive literary output had left its mark on generations of readers and writers.