a sesquipedalian henry miller reading list
Discover the ultimate Henry Miller reading list—a sesquipedalian journey through Tropic of Cancer, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, and The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy. Explore his fiction, memoirs, and drama in this curated literary guide.
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Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller
The account of a young writer and his friends in free-wheeling Paris.
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Tropic of Capricorn
by Henry Miller
A vicious social commentary of the times and culture of the 1920's New York City.
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Black Spring
by Henry Miller
Ten autobiographical pieces that take Miller from his childhood in Brooklyn to literary life in Paris.
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The Colossus of Maroussi
by Henry Miller
The author's quest for spiritual renewal is illuminated in descriptions of his impressions of Greece and its people.
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The Air-conditioned Nightmare
by Henry Miller
His stories and essays celebrate those rare individuals (famous and obscure) whose creative resilience and mere existence oppose the mechanization of minds and souls.
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Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
by Henry Miller
Tells the story of Miller's life on Big Sur, a section of California coast where he lived for fifteen years.
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Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
by Henry Miller
One of Henry Miller's most luminous statements of his personal philosophy of life, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, provides a symbolic title for this collection of stories and essays. Many of them have appeared only in foreign magazines while others were printed in small limited editions which have gone out of print. Miller's genius for comedy is at its best in "Money and How It Gets That Way"--a tongue-in-cheek parody of "economics" provoked by a postcard from Ezra Pound which asked if he "ever thought about money." His deep concern for the role of the artist in society appears in "An Open Letter to All and Sundry," and in "The Angel is My Watermark" he writes of his own passionate love affair with painting. "The Immorality of Morality" is an eloquent discussion of censorship. Some of the stories, such as "First Love," are autobiographical, and there are portraits of friends, such as "Patchen: Man of Anger and Light," and essays on other writers such as Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Sherwood Anderson and Ionesco. Taken together, these highly readable pieces reflect the incredible vitality and variety of interests of the writer who extended the frontiers of modern literature with Tropic of Cancer and other great books.
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Quiet Days in Clichy
by Henry Miller
"Quiet Days in Clichy is a novella written by Henry Miller. It is based on his experience as a Parisian expatriate in the early 1930s, when he and Alfred Perlès shared a small apartment in suburban Clichy as struggling writers (at 4 Avenue Anatole-France)." -- Wikipedia.com viewed May 6, 2021.
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The Rosy Crucifixion: Sexus
by Henry Miller
The first book of a trilogy of novels known collectively as "The Rosy Crucifixion." It is autobiographical and tells the story of Miller's first tempestuous marriage and his relentless sexual exploits in New York. The other books are "Plexus" and "Nexus."
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The Rosy Crucifixion: Plexus
by Henry Miller
The second novel of Miller's frank, autobiographical trilogy continues to use fantasy, dream, and burlesque to portray the life of a struggling writer in pre-World War I New York.
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The Rosy Crucifixion: Nexus
by Henry Miller
The final novel of Miller's frank, autobiographical trilogy continues to use burlesque, fantasy and dream to portray the life of a struggling writer in pre-World War I New York.
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The Time of the Assassins
by Henry Miller
This study is not literary criticism but a fascinating chapter in Miller's own spiritual autobiography. The social function of the creative personality is a recurrent theme with Henry Miller, and this book is perhaps his most poignant and concentrated analysis of the artist's dilemma.
