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Illustrated portrait of Henry Miller

A character in The Durrell–Miller Letters, 1935–1980

Henry Miller

The established Paris writer who answers one intelligent fan letter and finds the reader, advocate, and friend he keeps for the rest of his life.

What they want in the editors’ selected correspondence

To be read intelligently and to keep exchanging the energy that first fan letter released.

Henry Miller — books, places, and life

The book

Cover of The Durrell–Miller Letters, 1935–1980 by Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller
The Durrell–Miller Letters, 1935–1980Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller, 1988

Forty-five years and nearly a million words — the expanded correspondence that restored lost letters and passages cut from the 1963 selection.

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At a glance

In the book
Co-correspondent from 1935 until his death
At the beginning
The Paris author of Tropic of Cancer
Home in later letters
California
Span
1935–1980
The real person
Henry Miller · 1891–1980 · New York, Paris, and California

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Henry Miller enters as the forty-three-year-old author of a scandalous Paris book that has found one unusually responsive reader on Corfu. He answers Durrell because the letter understands the work rather than merely reacting to its notoriety.

The ensuing exchange lets Miller appear as working writer rather than finished legend: asking for news, testing judgments, discussing manuscripts, painting, money, health, and the people moving through the Villa Seurat circle.

The final year gives the long correspondence its natural boundary. The exchange ends with Miller’s death in 1980, not with an editorial break imposed while Durrell and Miller were still writing.

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