Two of my favourite books are Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer' and 'Tropic of Capricorn.'
Henry Miller may write about revelers self-woven into a human hooked rug, because his ecstasy is solemn.
One of the best things Henry Miller ever said was that art goes all out. It's all out. It goes full length. . . . A big book is an all-out book in which you limit your life to things that pertain directly to the book.
I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.
Henry Miller is a famous writer whose work has fallen out of fashion, but I strongly recommend that readers who don't know his work pick up a book and experience this writer's zealous, crazy, inventive, funny, sexy, often delirious prose.
[Henry Miller] was such a scribomaniac that even when he lived in the same house as Lawrence Durrell they often exchanged letters. For most of his life, Henry wrote literally dozens of letters a day to people he could have easily engaged in conversation - and did. The writing process, in short, was essential. As it is to all real writers, writing was life and breath to him. He put out words as a tree puts out leaves.
I was influenced by autobiographical writers like Henry Miller, and I had actually done some autobiographical prose. But I just thought that comics were like virgin territory. There was so much to be done. It excited me. I couldn't draw very well. I could write scripts and storyboard style using stick figures and balloons and captions.
If American literature has a few heroes, Miller is one of them. He refused to name names at the McCarthy hearings, and his play 'The Crucible' analysed the hearings in the context of a previous American mass psychosis, the Salem witch trials.
All good writers inspire me as I have never thought I was any good. As far as a writer who made me think I could do it, it was Henry Miller. Not because I thought he was so simple that I reckoned I could pull it off as well, but it was his freedom and guts that really moved me to want to write all the time.
In 1939, Orwell wrote a long essay titled 'Inside the Whale,' about modernism, the nineteen-thirties, Henry Miller, and 'Tropic of Cancer.'
I read Henry Miller's 'Nexus,' 'Sexus' and 'Plexus' the summer after I graduated from college. It cemented my decision to spurn any and all careers.
