Quiet Days in Clichy
This tender and nostalgic work dates from the same period as Tropic of Cancer (1934). It is a celebration of love, art, and the Bohemian life at a time when the world was simpler and slower, and Miller an obscure, penniless young writer in Paris. Whether discussing the early days of his long friendship with Alfred Perles or his escapades at the Club Melody brothel, in Quiet Days in Clichy Miller describes a period that would shape his entire life and oeuvre."There is nothing like Henry Miller when he gets rolling.... One has to take the English language back to Marlowe and Shakespeare before encountering a wealth of imagery equal in intensity.... Nobody has ever written in just this way before, nobody may ever write in this style so well again. A time and a place have come to focus in a writer's voice.... [Miller is] a wildwater of prose, a cataract, a volcano, a torrent, an earthquake...a writer finally like a great athlete, a phenomenon of an avatar of literary energy."--Norman Mailer"That Henry Miller is a great artist, a great American artist, and perhaps the last one we can be proud of--that he is one of the last of our literary giants who rose up during that marvelous period from 1890 to the 1940s--there is no doubt in my mind."--Maxwell Geismar"The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past."--George Orwell"American literature today begins and ends with the meaning of what Miller has done."--Lawrence DurrellHenry Miller was born in December 1891 in New York City. He spent most of his life in Brooklyn, Paris, and Big Sur, California, where he died in June 1980. Widely acknowledged as one of the most influential writers in American literature, he gained fame with Tropic of Cancer, which was banned in the United States until 1961. His other works include Tropic of Capricorn, Black Spring, Under the Roofs of Paris, the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy (Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus), and Crazy Cock.