The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939–1944

No volume of the diary covers more distance between its first page and its last. It opens in exile: the Paris reputation worth nothing on the American market, the French books unpublishable, the circle scattered by war. Nin's answer fills the volume's center — the hand press she and Gonzalo Moré ran on Macdougal Street, setting type for Winter of Artifice and Under a Glass Bell page by page, publishing as a physical act of will.

Threaded through it is the era's strangest literary employment: the anonymous collector paying a dollar a page for erotica, with Nin at the center of a circle of hungry writers feeding the same patron. The diary records the arrangement with wry exasperation — 'less poetry,' the famous instruction came back — never guessing the pages would outsell everything else she wrote when Delta of Venus surfaced three decades later. Provincetown summers, the young poets, and wartime New York fill the margins until the volume's turn: April 1944, Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker, and the years of printing her own books coming to their vindication.

New York, 1939–1944: finding rooms and allies in Greenwich Village; the refugee wave carrying half of literary Europe past her table; money running short and the collector's dollar-a-page commission arriving through Henry Miller; the founding of the Gemor Press and the physical labor of the books; Provincetown in the summers; and the slow assembly of a new circle — younger, American — around the woman the Paris legend preceded.