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Illustrated portrait of Lawrence Durrell

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

Lawrence Durrell

The young admirer who becomes Miller’s ideal reader, closest literary ally, critic, and correspondent for forty-five years.

What they want in the editors’ selected correspondence

To keep the literary friendship alive as a place for candor, argument, encouragement, and first readings.

Lawrence Durrell — 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.

View the book

At a glance

In the book
Co-correspondent from the first 1935 letter onward
At the beginning
A young British writer living on Corfu
Major later work
The Alexandria Quartet
Span
1935–1980
The real person
Lawrence Durrell · 1912–1990 · British India, Greece, Egypt, and France

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Lawrence Durrell begins the correspondence in 1935 as a twenty-three-year-old writer on Corfu writing to the author of Tropic of Cancer. He ends it as the internationally known author of The Alexandria Quartet and Miller’s friend of forty-five years.

Across the letters he is reader, provocateur, promoter, host, and fellow craftsman. Distance makes the exchange possible: the two men spend much of their friendship apart, sending manuscripts and judgments between islands, cities, and continents.

This volume is edited correspondence, so every portrait is also shaped by selection. Ian S. MacNiven’s 1988 edition recovers more of Durrell’s side than the 1963 volume while still representing only part of the surviving archive.

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