Henry Miller

Born in New York in 1891, he lived in Europe for many years but later settled in California and lived to the age of 88. His semi-autobiographical early novels Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939) brought him acclaim as a writer. These books were officially banned as obscene in the US and Britain until the 1960s over their sexually explicit passages, though imported and bootlegged copies were widely available. His later "Rosy Crucifixion" trilogy consisting of Sexus (1949), Plexus (1953) and Nexus (1960) were equally notorious for their frank sexual accounts and celebration of the bohemian life. The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Miller's style as blending "metaphysical speculation (he was interested in both theosophy and astrology) with sexually explicit scenes, surreal passages and scenes of grotesque comedy."

Neeraja Vinaswathan recounts a great used bookstore find. "On a recent Sunday, I took a trip to the Strand, a used-book store in downtown Manhattan whose shelving system makes locating a specific title roughly equivalent to searching for the Holy Grail. I say this to emphasize that I did not go there looking for porn. Within a few minutes, I was holding an innocuous-looking copy of Henry Miller's Opus Pistorum. A cursory page-flip led to the same rush of damp sensation I got from opening my first dirty book at the age of ten. Soon I was leaning furtively in the corner, trying to memorize any one of the book's dozens of sexy and shame-inducing scenes for use later that night." (Jun 2002)