Henry Miller was an American novelist whose frank, exuberant, and sexually explicit autobiographical books broke literary taboos and made him a controversial pioneer of free expression. Born in New York City and raised in Brooklyn, he drifted through a variety of jobs and a restless early life before abandoning conventional society to devote himself to writing, determined to record his own experience without restraint.
In 1930 Miller moved to Paris, then a haven for expatriate writers, where he lived in bohemian poverty and found his voice. There he wrote his most famous works, Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, raw, freewheeling, semi-autobiographical accounts of his life among the artists, prostitutes, and drifters of the city, written in a torrential, uninhibited style that mixed philosophy, comedy, and explicit sexuality.
Because of their sexual frankness, the books were banned as obscene in the United States and Britain for decades, circulating only underground even as they influenced a generation of writers. Not until the 1960s, after landmark court battles over censorship, were they finally published openly in America — a victory that helped expand the boundaries of literary freedom.
Miller wrote many other books, including The Colossus of Maroussi and the autobiographical Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, and championed a philosophy of personal liberation and acceptance of life in all its messiness. Settling eventually in California, he became an admired elder figure to the Beat writers and the counterculture. He died in 1980, his battle against censorship a lasting part of his legacy.