The Unknown Henry Miller: A Seeker in Big Sur
A refreshing biography of Henry Miller (1891–1980) that plunges into his work and spares readers some tedious early detail.California-based  educator and documentary filmmaker Hoyle catches up with Miller in  1939, when he was wrapping up his years of bohemian living in Paris,  facing the prospect of German invasion and coming war. The social and  moral collapses he witnessed about him are vividly captured in the work  he produced during the 1930s, published by Jack Kahane through his  Obelisk Press in Paris. These included Miller’s signature works  celebrating the “artist of life,” such as Tropic of Cancer, published in  1934, which gave him notoriety in Europe but was banned in England and  the United States for alleged obscenity until the early 1960s. Indeed,  at this juncture, Miller was frustrated by the inability to publish his  work in America. As impecunious as when he arrived in Paris, he was  fatalistic about his future writing career: “I lack the courage for  further hardships.” Moreover, his important love and benefactress, Anaïs  Nin, was not going to leave her husband and make an idyllic life with  Miller, and his interludes in Corfu and to New York meant an imminent  break with her. Hoyle quotes extensively from Miller’s prodigious  correspondence. Dismayed by the ugly acquisitiveness of New York, Miller  nonetheless reconnected with his troubled family in Brooklyn, writing  about this period as the reconciliation of the prodigal son. Moving to  California, and being offered, in 1944, a cheap cabin to use in Big Sur,  a region of startling natural beauty, radically altered Miller’s sense  of his American identity and destiny as a writer. Here he would embark  on his deeply autobiographical account of his upbringing, The Rosy  Crucifixion, and forge important new relationships that would nourish  his work and solidify his literary legacy as more than a “lowly" pornographer. Despite distracting tense changes, Hoyle offers generous interpretations of Miller’s oeuvre."An admiring biography of the novelist, who turned the events and people  of his life into fiction." Morris Hounion - Library Journal