Henry Miller
The Paris Years
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“A wonderful portrait of Miller in his heyday: full of beans and braggadocio, overflowing with the lust to live and write.”—Erica Jong
His years in Paris were the making of Henry Miller. He arrived with no money, no fixed address, and no prospects. He left as the renowned if not notorious author of Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. Miller didn’t just live in Paris—he devoured it. It was a world he shared with Brassaï, whose work, first collected in Paris by Night, established him as one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century and the most exquisite and perceptive chronicler of Parisian vice.
In Miller, Brassaï found his most compelling subject. Henry Miller: The Paris Years is an intimate account of a writer’s self-discovery, seen through the unblinking eye of a master photographer. Brassaï delves into Miller’s relationships with Anaïs Nin and Lawrence Durrell, as well as his hopelessly tangled though wildly inspiring marriage to June. He uncovers a side of the man scarcely known to the public, and through this careful portrait recreates a bright and swift-moving era. Most of all, Brassaï evokes their shared passion for the street life of the City of Light, captured in a dazzling moment of illumination.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Originally published in France in 1975, famed photographer Brassai's exuberant account of Henry Miller's years in Paris (1930-1939) and of his friendship with the expatriate American writer comprises a delightful, sparkling memoir that seems to define the essence of Miller, both the man and the mystique. Bohemian, interwar Paris had a liberating effect on the Francophile, penurious exile from New York, who wrote Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring and Tropic of Capricorn during those heady years. Brassai paints Miler as a manic-depressive with a fierce appetite for life, driven by feelings of being a pathetic failure, a great storyteller whose egocentric philosophy blinded him to social and political realities. Brassai provides an intermittently illuminating analysis of the triangle involving Miller, Anais Nin and Miller's estranged wife, June, who burst onto the Paris scene in 1932. There are piquant observations of Miller's friendships with novelists Lawrence Durrell, Blaise Cendrars, Raymond Queneau and Alfred Perles, as he moved from nihilism to a mystical phase. Sixteen of Brassai's photographs of Paris and of Miller perfectly complement the text.
