Black Spring

Name: Black Spring
ISBN: 978-1-0000-0111-0

by Henry Miller

Ten hallucinatory riffs between Brooklyn's 14th Ward and the Paris streets — Miller at his most purely musical.

Published: 1936
Pages: 243
Setting: Paris, New York
Era: The thirties, Belle Époque
Shelf rating: 4.2

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The story, briefly

Spoiler-free

Less a narrative than a set of prose arias, Black Spring swings between a Brooklyn boyhood among tailors and saloons and the Paris present of the writing desk — with detours through dreams, Dijon, and a defense of the water closet as literature's true home. It is the Miller book critics most often call his best-written: the scandal quieter, the sentences louder.

Why we recommend it

'The Fourteenth Ward'
The opening Brooklyn chapter is the tenderest thing Miller ever wrote — immigrant streets recalled with a love that makes the later rage legible.
The style at full orchestra
Freed from even Cancer's loose diary shape, the sentences go where they want — surrealist catalogs, dream sequences, sudden aphorisms. This is the book to read aloud.
The bridge book
Between Cancer's Paris present and Capricorn's New York past, Black Spring is the span — and the clearest view of what Miller was actually building across the trilogy.

What this book explores

The cityParis and New York as characters — feeders, seducers, devourers.
The craftWriting about writing — one true sentence at a time.
DesireAppetite in all its forms, indulged and paid for.

Bring it to book club

Which mode of Miller survives best — the Brooklyn elegy, the Paris diary, or the surrealist riff?
'I am a patriot — of the Fourteenth Ward.' How does this hometown loyalty square with the expatriate's flight?
Does removing most of the sex change what Miller's project actually is?

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