In 1958, when Henry Miller was elected to membership in the American
Institute of Arts and Letters, the citation described him as: The
veteran author of many books whose originality and richness of technique
are matched by the variety and daring of his subject matter. His
boldness of approach and intense curiosity concerning man and nature are
unequalled in the prose literature of our times. It is most fitting that
this anthology of the best of Henry Miller should have been assembled by
one of the first among Miller's contemporaries to recognize his genius,
the eminent British writer Lawrence Durrell. Drawing material from a
dozen different books Durrell has traced the main line and principal
themes of the single, endless autobiography which is Henry Miller's life
work. I suspect, writes Durrell in his Introduction, that Miller's final
place will be among those towering anomalies of authorship like Whitman
or Blake who have left us, not simply works of art, but a corpus of
ideas which motivate and influence a whole cultural pattern. Earlier, H.
L. Mencken had said, his is one of the most beautiful prose styles
today, and the late Sir Herbert Read had written that what makes Miller
distinctive among modern writers is his ability to combine, without
confusion, the aesthetic and prophetic functions. Included are stories,
portraits of persons and places, philosophical essays, and aphorisms.
For each selection Miller himself prepared a brief commentary which fits
the piece into its place in his life story. This framework is
supplemented by a chronology from Miller's birth in 1891 up to the
spring of 1959, a bibliography, and, as an appendix, an open letter to
the Supreme Court of Norway written in protest of the ban on Sexus, a
part of which appears in this volume.
