The US-American author Henry Miller was born in New York in 1891. At first Henry Valentine Miller led a rather unsteady life. He dropped out of school and made ends meet with odd jobs, at the same time he wrote first rather unsuccessful works. After he had been working at the New York Western Union Telegraph Company for four years, Miller went to Paris in 1930, where he was in contact with the avant-garde of visual artists and littérateurs. Eventually Henry Miller met Anaïs Nin, with whom he and his second wife June had a ménage à trois. In the early 1940s Henry Miller moved to Big Sur in California, where he would from then on live and work. In 1980 Henry Miller died at the age of 88 in Los Angeles.
Henry Miller definitely counts among the most enigmatic authors of the 20th century, which is largely due to his explicit erotic and sexual themes, the unsparing Naturalism in his works and the self references in his oeuvre - not only in his autobiography "Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch" (1957). A lot of works by Henry Miller, which were often met with controversy in the days of their origin and were blacklisted accordingly, became classics. Among them are "Tropic of cancer", 1934 and "Tropic of capricorn", 1939, as well as the trilogy "The rosy crucifixion" comprising the three books "Sexus" (1949), "Plexus" (1952) and "Nexus" (1960), and "Quiet days in Clichy", 1956).