Henry Miller - a life (2012)

Born in Brooklyn in 1891, son of a tailor of German extraction, Miller would embrace a freewheeling existence that carried him through umpteen jobs and sexual encounters, providing rich source material for the novels he would write. 

Greenwich Village and Paris in the 1920s offered rich pickings, as did Miller's ten-year affair with Anais Nin. But he was 69 before Tropic of Cancer was legally published in the US and made him famous, almost 30 years from its composition and long after his peers had devoured it in contraband French editions.

Robert Ferguson reveals Miller as a amalgam of vulnerability and insouciance, who endured thirty years of official opprobrium but won the respect of Orwell, T.S. Eliot and Lawrence Durrell, and readers by the thousands.

'This impressive biography [is] good, dirty...