Black Spring by Henry Miller

Paperback

256 pages

Black Spring is vintage Miller. Continuing the subversive self-revelation begun in Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, he sucks us along at his mad, free-associating pace as he reverberates between America and Paris, transporting us from the damp grime of his Brooklyn youth to sun-splashed French cafés and squalid Paris flats; from a winter night, pure as ammonia, to a dream where a woman’s body has the strong white aroma of sorrow. Miller writes with an incomparable hard glee, shifting effortlessly from Vergil to venereal disease, from Rabelais to Roquefort, to the beauty of a statue defaced during a carnival. He captures like no one else the blending of people and the cities they inhabit, and Black Spring coheres in a seductive technicolor swirl of Paris and New York.

Henry Miller was born in New York City on December 26, 1891. Miller briefly attended City College of New York, but abandoned his university studies after only two months. In 1930 Miller traveled to Paris, where he stayed until 1940. During this period he was financed by his lover and fellow writer, Anaïs Nin, who helped him obtain a first printing of the celebrated and controversial Tropic of Cancer (1934); the book was banned in the United States at the time Grove Press printed it in 1961, which promptly initiated a costly, but successful, Supreme Court case to overrule the ban.