Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin
Nin paid for Tropic of Cancer with six hundred dollars borrowed from her psychoanalyst, then wrote its preface. The affair is the part everyone knows. The money is the part that got the book printed.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931–1934
by Anaïs Nin
The century's most famous journal opens on Louveciennes, 1931 — Miller at the table, June in the doorway, and a woman writing it all down as it happens.
- 1966
- Atmospheric
- Melancholy
- intimate
- autobiographical
- sensual
- lyrical
About Anaïs Nin
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeThe first published volume of the sixty-year diary, and the essential one: Paris and Louveciennes from 1931 to 1934, with Henry Miller arriving poor and volcanic, his wife June trailing enigma, Antonin Artaud burning, Otto Rank analyzing, and Nin's long-lost father returning for the strangest reunion in modern letters. A self-portrait painted in real time, by the era's most watchful inhabitant. (A diary — the endings wait behind the reveal.)
The story, in more detail
The diary existed forty years before the public saw a page: begun in 1914 as an unsent letter to the father who had abandoned the family, it grew into a daily practice, a confessional, a workshop, and — as Nin's Paris decade filled with remarkable people — a group portrait no novelist could have invented. Publishers had wanted the diary for decades; the problem was the living, and the solution, reached with editor Gunther Stuhlmann in the 1960s, was careful pruning — most consequentially of her husband, Hugh Guiler, edited out at his own request, an absence readers have argued about ever since.
Publication in 1966 was an event beyond literature: the interior life was having its decade, and here were thousands of pages of one woman's, kept against every convention. The Diary made Nin famous at sixty-three, a lecture-hall icon to a generation of readers — and it made Louveciennes, the Villa Seurat, and the winter of 1931 permanent addresses on the map of modern writing. The unexpurgated volumes that followed her death (Henry & June first among them) restored what 1966 couldn't print, and the full project now reads as what it always was: the century's longest, most deliberate act of self-creation.
The full story
It opens at Louveciennes, the house outside Paris where Nin lives with a banker husband the text keeps offstage, writing and waiting for her real life to start. It starts in the winter of 1931: Henry Miller comes to lunch — broke, voracious, writing an unpublishable book — and behind him his wife June, all mystery and hunger, who fascinates Nin even more. The diary tracks the triangle with a precision no novel would dare: patronage becoming intimacy, June's departures and returns, and the Tropic of Cancer years recorded from the inside — the borrowed money, the preface, the printing.
Around the Millers the cast thickens: Antonin Artaud, incandescent and impossible; the analysts — Allendy, then Otto Rank — as Nin moves from patient to practitioner; and, at the volume's dark center, the return of Joaquín Nin, the father whose leaving started the diary itself, now courting his grown daughter's admiration. The volume's texture is the marvel: dreams, sessions, dinner parties, and drafts, all rendered in present tense, by a writer who has decided that her life is the manuscript.
How it ends — spoilers ahead
The volume closes on departures that are also verdicts. The reunion with her father plays out to its strange end and is refused: the enchanter is seen through, and the diary's founding wound closes with terrible quietness. In August 1934 comes the passage readers never forget — the stillbirth of her daughter, written with an unflinching tenderness that stands among the era's greatest pages, whatever shelf it sits on. And in the last entries she sails for New York to join Rank and practice analysis herself: the watcher of the Paris years stepping, finally, into her own profession — with the diary, as always, packed first.
Why we recommend it
The other side of Tropic of Cancer
The same winters, dinners, and borrowed francs that Miller mythologized — recorded nightly by the person who paid for the printing.
A form of her own
Not memoir, not autofiction — the diary as a lifelong art form, argued for page by page until a generation agreed.
The cast
Miller and June, Artaud, Rank, the returning father — a portrait gallery of the thirties that no novel assembled under one roof.
What this book explores
The people in its pages
Henry Miller
The American writer she met in the winter of 1931, when he was broke and unpublished. He appears in the diary more than anyone else — talking, borrowing, and writing the book that became Tropic of Cancer.
June Miller
Henry Miller's wife, who crosses from New York and takes over the book. Nin's fascination with her runs a hundred pages and ends badly.
Antonin Artaud
The French poet and theatre director she met in 1933. He wrote her letters for a year, then accused her of never having loved him.
Otto Rank
The Viennese psychoanalyst who had been Freud's closest collaborator and then broke with him. He analysed Nin in 1933 and 1934, and she followed him to New York.
René Allendy
Her first analyst, a Paris doctor who also wrote on astrology and alchemy. He treated her for a year and then stopped being able to stay objective about her.
Joaquín Nin
Her father, a Spanish composer and concert pianist, who left the family when she was a child. He comes back in 1933, and the reunion runs through the second half of the book.
Rosa Culmell de Nin
Her mother, who raised the three children alone after her husband left, and who is living in the Louveciennes house all through the diary.
Joaquín Nin-Culmell
Her younger brother, a pianist and composer living in the same house. He disapproves of Henry Miller and refuses to meet their father.
Alfred Perlès
The Austrian journalist who shared the Clichy flat with Henry Miller. Nin calls him Fred, and he is the gentlest person in the book.
Also in the book
Marguerite S.
The young translator who typed the diary in the garden at Louveciennes, and who sent Nin to the analyst René Allendy.
Emilia
The Spanish maid at Louveciennes. She opens the gate for almost everyone who arrives in this book.
From the Journal
Bring it to book club
- Is the edited Diary a compromised text or its own deliberate work of art?
- Nin watches everyone — who in this volume ever really sees her?
Timeline
1914
Nin begins the diary as an unsent letter to the father who had left the family.
1931–1934
The years of the first published volume: Miller and June, Antonin Artaud, the analyst Otto Rank, and her father's return, recorded at Louveciennes and in Paris.
1966
Harcourt, Brace & World publishes the first volume, edited by Gunther Stuhlmann with her husband edited out at his own request, and it makes Nin famous at sixty-three.
Book editions
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Harcourt, Brace & World / The Swallow Press
- 1966
Paperback
- Paperback
- Harcourt
Reader reviews
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Tropic of Cancer
The book being written, funded, and prefaced inside these very entries.
Read our take
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931–1934: frequently asked questions
Who wrote The Diary of Anaïs Nin?
Anaïs Nin. This first published volume appeared in 1966, drawn from a diary she had kept since 1914.
What is this volume of the diary about?
Paris and Louveciennes from 1931 to 1934 — Henry Miller arriving poor and volcanic, his wife June, Antonin Artaud, the analyst Otto Rank, and the strange return of Nin's long-lost father. A self-portrait painted in real time.
Is this the first volume of the diary?
Yes. It is the first published volume and the essential one, covering the early-1930s Paris years at the center of her story.
How long did Nin keep her diary?
For sixty years, from 1914 until her death — the great continuous self-portrait of the century, and the trunk from which her other writing was cut.
How does it differ from Henry & June?
The published Diary left out the erotic center of these years. That fuller, franker account of Nin's entanglement with Miller and June appeared later, drawn from the uncut journals, as Henry & June (1986).