In his great triptych "The Millennium" Bosch used oranges and other fruits to symbolize the delights of Paradise. Whence Henry Miller's title for this, one of his most appealing books; first published in 1957, it tells the story of Miller's life on the Big Sur, a section of California coast where he lived for fifteen years.
Big Sur is the portrait of a place—one of the most colorful in the U.S.—and of the extraordinary people Miller knew there: writers (& writers who didn't write), mystics seeking truth in meditation (& the not-so-saintly looking for sex-cults or celebrity), sophisticated children & adult innocents; geniuses, cranks & the unclassifiable.
Henry Miller writes with a buoyancy & brimming energy that are infectious. He has a fine touch for comedy. But this is also a serious book—the testament of a free spirit who has broken through the restraints & cliches of modern life to find within himself his own kind of paradise.

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.

In this selection of stories and essays, Henry Miller elucidates, revels, and soars, showing his command over a wide range of moods, styles, and subject matters. Writing “from the heart,” always with a refreshing lack of reticence, Miller involves the reader directly in his thoughts and feelings. “His real aim,” Karl Shapiro has written, “is to find the living core of our world whenever it survives and in whatever manifestation, in art, in literature, in human behavior itself. It is then that he sings, praises, and shouts at the top of his lungs with the uncontainable hilarity he is famous for.”
Here are some of Henry Miller’s best-known writings: an essay on the photographer Brassai; “Reflections on Writing,” in which Miller examines his own position as a writer; “Seraphita” and “Balzac and His Double,” on the works of other writers; and “The Alcoholic Veteran,” “Creative Death,” “The Enormous Womb,” and “The Philosopher Who Philosophizes.”

The Miller-Gertz correspondence, in addition to the documentation it provides on the famous struggle to free Tropic of Cancer of obscenity charges, is important for numerous reasons, among them being that Henry Miller wrote intimately to Elmer Gertz on a wide range of topics, including his thoughts about the book which won him public recognition in his own country—at long last.
Still a controversial figure in the 1960s, but with an impressive following, especially abroad where his works were published freely in many languages, Henry Miller had been denied publication of his major works in his own country until 1961, when Grove Press published Tropic of Cancer, precipitating a long, costly, and often bitter battle against the continuing censorship of his autobiographical novels.
The attorney chosen by Grove Press to represent the publisher in Illinois was Elmer Gertz, himself a literary critic and historian by avocation, who began intensive preparation by reading everything by and about Miller he could put his hands on, which led indirectly to the letter from Miller that opened their correspondence.
Throughout the long, taxing months of this historic battle for freedom of expression, the bonds linking Cancer’s author and his attorney multiplied and strengthened. They tested themselves and the world, their subjects ranging from the arts to business and family matters; from social problems to films and Hollywood personalities; from courtroom pyrotechnics to ping-pong. An almost day-by-day record of Miller’s activities emerges as he speaks of his writing and painting, his social life, his personal concerns, his travels, his contacts with publishers and theatrical producers. Moreover, the unguarded thoughts expressed through all of the correspondence produced astonishing self-revelations, which makes this volume especially valuable.

Some writers attempt to conceal the literary influences which have shaped their thinking-but not Henry Miller. In this unique work, he gives an utterly candid and self-revealing account of the reading he did during his formative years. In The Books in My Life he shares the thrills of discovery that many kinds of books have brought to a keenly curious and questioning mind.
Some of Miller's favorite writers are the giants whom most of us revere - authors such as Dostoevsky, Boccaccio, Walt Whitman, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Lao-Tse. To them he brings fresh and penetrating insights. But many are lesser-known figures: Krishnamurti, the prophet-sage; the French contemporaries Blaise Cendrars and Jean Giono; Richard Jeffries, who wrote The Story of My Heart; the Welshman John Cowper Powys; and scores of others.
The Books in My Life contains some fine autobiographical chapters, too. Miller describes his boyhood in Brooklyn, when he devoured the historical stories of G. A. Henty and the romances of Rider Haggard. He tells of the men and women whom he regards as "living books": Lou Jacobs, W. E. B. Dubois, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and others. He offers his reminiscences of the New York Theatre in the early 1900's - including plays such as Alias Jimmy Valentine and Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model. And finally, in Miller's best vein of humor, he provides a satiric chapter on bathroom reading. In an appendix, Miller lists the hundred books that have influences him most.
亨利．米勒是美國文壇知名的情色懺悔大師，著有《北回歸線》等多部引人爭議的小說。《我一生中的書》是亨利．米勒的長年下來的閱讀筆記。不同於有些作家，他們喜歡把影響他們思想形成的文學作品隱藏起來，祕而不宣，米勒則完全相反。在這部風格獨特的著作中，他以徹底的坦白和自我剖析精神，道出形塑他性格的閱讀經歷，把每一本書曾經帶給他的震撼與欣喜，傳達給讀者。
米勒鐘愛的作家中，有公認的文豪巨匠，如杜斯妥也夫斯基、惠特曼、喬伊斯、托馬斯．曼、及老子等。但也有較不為人知的人物，如性靈大師克里希那穆提、法國當代作家布萊斯?桑德拉爾等。
《我一生中的書》還包括了米勒自傳性的敘述，他提到那些在不同階段影響自己生命的男男女女，稱他們為「活生生的書」。書的最後，米勒更以他慣有的幽默，與我們分享在廁所裡看書的經驗，表現出十足的米勒風格。

Tired of his demeaning job and tempestuous marriage, Dion Moloch, an anti-Semite living in Brooklyn during the 1920s, escapes to the streets and battles against a world that threatens to destroy him.

Henry Miller’s landmark travel book, now reissued in a new edition, is ready to be stuffed into any vagabond’s backpack.
Like the ancient colossus that stood over the harbor of Rhodes, Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi stands as a seminal classic in travel literature. It has preceded the footsteps of prominent travel writers such as Pico Iyer and Rolf Potts. The book Miller would later cite as his favorite began with a young woman’s seductive description of Greece. Miller headed out with his friend Lawrence Durrell to explore the Grecian countryside: a flock of sheep nearly tramples the two as they lie naked on a beach; the Greek poet Katsmbalis, the “colossus” of Miller’s book, stirs every rooster within earshot of the Acropolis with his own loud crowing; cold hard-boiled eggs are warmed in a village’s single stove, and they stay in hotels that “have seen better days, but which have an aroma of the past.”

This tender and nostalgic work dates from the same period as Tropic of Cancer (1934). It is a celebration of love, art, and the Bohemian life at a time when the world was simpler and slower, and Miller an obscure, penniless young writer in Paris. Whether discussing the early days of his long friendship with Alfred Perles or his escapades at the Club Melody brothel, in Quiet Days in Clichy Miller describes a period that would shape his entire life and oeuvre.

Banned in America for almost thirty years because of its explicit sexual content, this companion volume to Miller’s Tropic of Cancer chronicles his life in 1920s New York City. Famous for its frank portrayal of life in Brooklyn’s ethnic neighborhoods and Miller’s outrageous sexual exploits, The Tropic of Capricorn is now considered a cornerstone of modern literature.