Henry Miller books

Anthologies

Collections

Non-Fiction

Short Stories/Novellas

Standalone Novels

The Rosy Crucifixion Reading Order

Tropic Reading Order

Ultimate Disaster Survival

Henry Miller (1891-1980) was an American writer born in Manhattan and raised in Brooklyn. He dropped out of City College of New York, worked a string of jobs from tailor to postal clerk, and moved to Paris in 1930 with almost no money. The decade he spent there became the most productive period of his life, during which he wrote the novels that would make him famous and keep his books out of American bookstores for thirty years.

Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939) are semi-autobiographical novels about his life in Paris and New York, written in a raw, explicit style that mixed stream-of-consciousness with philosophy and surrealism. Both were banned in the U.S. until the Supreme Court ruled in 1964 that Tropic of Cancer could not be censored. The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy (Sexus, Plexus, Nexus) covered his earlier years in New York. He spent his later decades in Big Sur, California, painting watercolors and writing essays until his death in 1980.