Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and essayist. In 1924 he met his second wife, June, who became his muse. His works are largely autobiographical, mixing despair and ecstasy. In 1930 he moved to Paris for 10 years, during which he wrote three novels "The Tropic of Cancer", "Black Spring" and "The Tropic of Capricorn" which were banned in the USA because they were deemed pornographic. Fleeing the war, he was invited to Greece by Lawrence Durrell, and then went back to California where he lived in Pacific Palisades until his death in 1980. Although his work was often considered to be scandalous it had a considerable influence on his contemporaries and especially on the Beat Generation writers.
