My Life and Times

The form suited him better than anyone expected: Miller had always been a talker who wrote, and the book's method — Bradley Smith taping the reminiscences at the Pacific Palisades house, then arranging the transcripts against photographs, paintings, and memorabilia — caught the performance the books could only transcribe. The result reads like an afternoon's visit: the Brooklyn tailor shop, the Cosmodemonic years, June, the Paris poverty, the Villa Seurat, Greece, the wilderness decades of the bans, told with the timing of a man who had told them ten thousand times and still enjoyed the telling.

That Playboy Press published it is its own late-Miller joke — the empire built on the liberation he'd been prosecuted for, now issuing him as a coffee-table classic. But the volume's real value is documentary: the photographs and watercolors put faces and rooms to the whole shelf, and the talk, unguarded and self-amused, is the closest thing on record to sitting across from him. For readers who come to Miller through these pages, it is the era's family album.

The life in stations, spoken: boyhood in the Fourteenth Ward; the years of failure and the escape to Paris; the making and banning of the Tropics; Greece, the war, Big Sur; the marriages, the watercolors, the vindication in the courts — each stretch of road illustrated with photographs from the family albums and friends' cameras, pages of manuscript, and the paintings that had become his daily practice.

A browsing book by design: open anywhere and the voice starts up mid-anecdote, which is exactly how its subject received visitors.