Henry Miller Books

Broke, shameless, and ecstatically alive in 1930s Paris — the banned book that ended American censorship.

Before Paris: the Brooklyn years, the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company, and the fury that made the flight necessary.

A clown, a ladder, a moon: the fable Miller called the strangest story he ever wrote — begun as a favor to Fernand Léger.

The Rosy Crucifixion begins: New York in the twenties, the marriage that must end, the woman who must be Mona — his most banned book.

The Rosy Crucifixion, book two: married to Mona, done with jobs forever, and learning — expensively — how to become a writer.

The happiest of the Paris books: two broke friends in a Clichy flat, and the era remembered as pure appetite.

The novel Miller wrote about losing June to another woman — abandoned in 1930, published in 1991, and rawer than anything he ever polished.

Miller's first surviving novel — Western Union, a failing first marriage, and New York as a machine for grinding men down, written in 1927 and unpublished for sixty-five years.

The Villa Seurat portfolio — portraits, surrealist manifestos, and the essay on Brassaï, gathered by Obelisk in 1938 and never quite reprinted whole.

The first Miller book America was allowed to read: stories and essays smuggled home from the Paris years, Tropics not included.

A 1955 mass-market paperback of Henry Miller's legal writing, sold for twenty-five cents while his major books were still banned in America.

Henry Miller's best pages from thirty years of writing, selected by his friend Lawrence Durrell.

One long letter to Alfred Perlès — Miller sails to New York in 1935, hates it magnificently, and sails back. A round trip, as the title says.

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

Greece, 1939: the light, the ruins, and a monologuist named Katsimbalis — the book Miller himself called his best.

A wartime miscellany with one masterpiece inside: 'Reunion in Brooklyn,' the exile's homecoming to the parents he fled.

Henry Miller's 1945 account of driving across the United States for a year and disliking most of what he found.

The scandalous autobiographer turns to the shelf: a reading life told like an adventure, from boyhood pulp to Cendrars.

Henry Miller's account of inviting a destitute Paris astrologer to live with him at Big Sur, and of how badly it went.

The scandalous exile finds his paradise: fog, cliffs, children, neighbors, pilgrims — and the question of whether paradise can be lived in.

The trilogy's last act: a third party in the marriage, the darkest New York winter — and at the end of it, a boat to Paris.

The life, told aloud at eighty: taped talk, photographs, watercolors — the scandalous century recollected from a sunny room.

Old age falls in love and can't sleep: the last great infatuation, confessed in prose and painted through the small hours.

The raw feed of the Nightmare: the actual notebook from the 1940–41 American tour, published in facsimile — blots, sketches, and all.

At eighty-four, the rememberer goes back to the beginning: the boys of the Fourteenth Ward, named and thanked one by one.

Six late chamber pieces in one volume — the old man's small forms, from a dream of his mother to the view from eighty.

Volume two of the friendships — opened, without apology, by the truest friend of all: the bicycle.

The last portrait in the gallery is the best friend of all: Fred Perlès — Carl of Clichy — thanked at last under the old pet name.

The century's most famous literary love affair, in its own hand: two decades of the Nin–Miller letters, selected by Gunther Stuhlmann.

Miller's surrealist film-on-paper, written after Anaïs Nin's House of Incest — 200 copies from Obelisk in 1937, with a drawing by Abraham Rattner.

A thousand pages of argument by mail — Miller and Michael Fraenkel start with Shakespeare and end with everything, from the Villa Seurat to the war.

Miller's own explanation of the banned books — the essay where he tells censors, critics, and readers what he thought the sex was for.

Essays from the turn of the decade — writing, Balzac, healers, and bums — where the Paris provocateur starts sounding like a sage.

Three friends argue about abstract painting in one slim volume — the painter from the Jockey bar, Miller, and Saroyan.

Volume two of the Nightmare: America surveyed again — but the heart of the book is the long, aching essay remembering France.

Miller on Rimbaud — the boy who invented modern poetry and walked away — in the least objective, most alive study ever written of him.

Late essays from the sage of Big Sur: Thoreau, the young Beats, the art of staying still while beating your wings.

Everything Miller ever said about the work itself, gathered into one volume — the accidental craft book of the century's least teachable writer.

The white whale of the Villa Seurat: the D. H. Lawrence book that nearly swallowed Miller in 1933, published at last in 1980.