How did my main man, Henry Miller, outcast and misfit of Brooklyn’s 14th ward (Williamsburg), American literary giant & “pornography”/anti-censorship pioneer #1, and one of the most unique and creative voices of the 20th century, become a lost man of American letters?

Certainly American academia and its politically correct sister in crime, post 60s American feminism, have cast him out… as misogynist public enemy #1. His rants, his books, “Tropic of Cancer”,

“Tropic of Capricorn”, “Black Spring”, “The Colossus of Maroussi”, “The Rosy Crucifixion” (Sexus, Plexus, & Nexus), “The Air Conditioned Nightmare” (his condemnation of 1940s American materialism, “modernity”, and conformity which presaged the 1950s counter-cultural beatniks and long-haired, 1960s zen-hippie revolutionaries); his role in early feminist #1, Anais Nin’s, many diaries; his books’ role in American jurisprudence, lifting the publication ban on “serious” literature with sex in its pages; his role as mentor and friend to Lawrence Durrell (“The Alexandria Quartet”)

And so many others; his courage and conviction to live outside American convention and conformity (“to live outside the law you must be honest”, Bob Dylan); his lifelong song of praise to self-reliance and self-discovery; his stubborn will to live in poverty for most of his adult artistic life, his brazen chutzpah in writing self-promotional appeals for financial support throughout his lifelong artistic journey; his loneliness, his need, his crudeness, his truth-telling, his stubbornness, his bravery, his genius, his willfulness, his independence…. all deserve mention and recognition in the annals of 20th century American, and world, literature.

A poetic wordsmith on the level of Joyce and Faulkner, it’s a crime of conventional literary criticism, to keep Henry Miller on the junk heap of American letters.

I hereby re-claim him, re-shout his name from the fetid and scatological alleyways of his salacious but romantic Latin Quarter of 1930s Paree, from the craggy and licentious hillsides of 1950s Partington’s Ridge in his isolated Big Sur where he wrote and lived off the support of the artistic community of which he became symbolic leader.

I shout it all the way back to the now obscenely-gentrified 14th ward of his Brooklyn boyhood, where his painful disaffection with his mother’s rigid German conformity, cast him as our quintessential artist-outlaw of the last century, whose words we should be recognizing and celebrating until… this very today.

“Don’t you know, Henry?”

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