The Winter of Artifice, 1939 edition

Anais Nin's second work of fiction, The Winter of Artifice, was, according to Nin, her only banned book. Published in France in 1939, it consisted of 3 novellas, each of which fictionalized an important event in Nin's life: her affair with Henry and June Miller ("Hans and Johanna"), her incestuous relationship with her father ("Lilith"), and her relationship with Otto Rank ("The Voice"). When Nin smuggled copies out of France to New York at the onset of World War Two, she immediately realized that she would be unable to republish it in the USA unless she took drastic steps to satifiy the censors. She cut out "Hans and Johanna" entirely, and she heavily edited the remaining two novellas, and she published the edited version with her own Gemor Press. Only a few copies of the original version exist today, and one of them was used to reproduce this ebook. It is an important document in Nin's literary canon, and the one that is most overlooked.