Henry Miller

Miller grew up in a German immigrant household in Brooklyn, drifted through a semester at CCNY and a string of odd jobs, and spent years as an employment manager for Western Union before abandoning it all for Paris in 1930, arriving with almost no money and no publisher. There he fell in with the diarist and heiress Anaïs Nin, who became his lover, patron, and editor, subsidizing him and helping steer Tropic of Cancer into print with the Obelisk Press in 1934.

The book's frank sexual content got it banned as obscene in the United States and Britain for decades; only a 1964 Supreme Court ruling finally allowed American publication, nearly thirty years after it first appeared in France. He married five times in all, including twice to June Mansfield, the second wife who inspired the Paris books.

He spent his later decades in Big Sur, California, painting watercolors and receiving literary pilgrims, and died there in 1980.