page_title: The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
section_title: Publication and reception
hierarchical_section_title: The Air-Conditioned Nightmare / Publication and reception
caption_attribution_description: 1932 Buick 8/50 sedan. Taken at the 2013 General Motors Display Day, held in the grounds of Penrith Panthers Club, Penrith NSW.
context_page_description: The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is a memoir written by Henry Miller, first published in 1945, about his year-long road trip across the United States in 1939, following his return from nearly a decade living in Paris.
context_section_description: Miller started writing the book in Detroit and wrote most of it in the summer of 1941 in Hollywood, California, where he completed the yearlong trip. It was rejected by Doubleday at the end of 1941, and Miller abandoned it until the end of World War II, when it was published by New Directions in 1945. Many of the book's chapters originally appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Town & Country, Quarterly Review of Literature and The Harvard Advocate.
  Miller was concerned about the reception the book would get, given his negative impression of the US during a time when patriotism was in vogue. Prior to its publication, he told Lawrence Durrell it was "a wasted year." The book met with a generally poor reception. Reviewing it for the New York Times, Orville Prescott deemed it "as shallow, snobbish, uninformed, pretentious and monstrously egocentric a book as ever I read in my life," concluding that Miller doesn't know enough about America to write a book about it. Prescott admits, however, that some of Miller's descriptions are "extremely well done" and that "he can occasionally achieve a certain sardonic power."
caption: A 1932 Buick sedan, similar to the car Miller purchased for the trip.
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