Henry Miller: A Life

“In this engrossing biography Ferguson measures the cheerful amoralist of Tropic of Cancer and The Rosy Crucifixion against the guilt-ridden, insecure male in revolt against his bourgeois Brooklyn family. . . . The Miller in these pages is neither the macho bully portrayed by feminists nor the adolescent sexual philosopher dismissed by the academic establishment, but a ‘unique…and necessary literary figure,’ a popular American sage….Richly rewarding.” ―Publishers Weekly

The only biography Henry Miller ever wanted was the one he himself wrote in the brash, life-affirming fictions of The Tropic of Capricorn, The Tropic of Cancer, and The Rosy Crucifixion. But Robert Ferguson’s new biography tells a different tale; for where the novels are sexually explicit and brutally frank―woundingly so to those close to Miller―they are also the fantasies of a man escaping from his past, and from himself.