Has any writer ever followed the "I write, therefore I am" mantra more vigorously than Henry Miller? His career is extraordinary and says much about our culture. I prefer Miller in smaller doses, such as "Henry Miller On Writing" and the Norman Mailer edited edition of his works, "Genius And Lust."
Henry Miller's "Gob of Spit"
On this day in 1986 the original manuscript of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer was auctioned for $165,000, then a record price for a 20th century literary manuscript. This is Miller's first novel, written during and about his penniless, bohemian years in Paris in the early thirties. The diaries of his friend and lover, Anais Nin, inspired Miller to rewrite his conventionally-structured (and unsellable) autobiographical novel, Crazy Cock, in diary form. With this new approach, Miller said that he found his writer's voice: the new book went down on the back of the old book's pages at a madcap pace -- twenty, thirty, sometimes forty-five pages a day, the author's chain-smoking keeping up with the typewriter, Beethoven or jazz or an African laughing record at full volume on his victrola. |
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