Anaïs Nin
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Anaïs Nin in the mid-1970s. |
Anaïs Nin (pronounced // "ana-EESE neen") (
February 21 1903 -
January 14 1977) was a
French-born
author of
Catalan,
Cuban, and
Danish descent who became famous for her published
diaries, which span more than sixty years, beginning when she was eleven years old and ending shortly before her death, as well as for her erotica.
For many years, Anaïs Nin maintained a double life as a
bigamist. Her first husband was Hugh Guiler, a banker and artist, whom she married as a young woman in the 1920s. Her second husband was
Rupert Pole, a
forester and step-grandson of architect
Frank Lloyd Wright, whom she married in the 1950s while still married to Guiler. Both men were apparently unaware of Nin's double life and did not meet until after Nin's death in 1977. After the death of Hugh Guiler in 1985, the unexpurgated, or uncensored, versions of her diaries were commissioned by Rupert Pole. [
1]
Anaïs Nin was born in
Neuilly,
France. After her parents separated, her mother moved Anaïs and her two brothers, Thorvald Nin and
Joaquin Nin-Culmell to
New York City. While still a teenager, Nin abandoned formal schooling and began working as a
model.
In
1923, she married Hugh Parker Guiler. The couple moved to
Paris, France the following year, where Guiler pursued his
banking career and Nin began to pursue her interest in writing, where her first published work was a critical evaluation of
D. H. Lawrence called "D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study." She also explored the field of
psychotherapy, studying under the likes of
Otto Rank, a disciple of
Sigmund Freud.In
1954 Nin appears in the
Kenneth Anger film "Inauguration of the pleasure dome" as
Astarte and the Maya Deren film "Ritual in Transfigured Time". She also entered into a second, bigamous marriage to Rupert Pole in California.
She often cited authors
Djuna Barnes and
D. H. Lawrence as inspirations.
Anaïs Nin is perhaps most famous as a diarist. Her diaries, which span several decades, are fascinating for many reasons. Nin was acquainted, often quite intimately, with a number of prominent authors, artists, and psychoanalysts, among other figures. Her diaries portray these persons in an unusual depth of analysis and frankness of description. Moreover, as a female author describing a primarily masculine constellation of celebrities, Nin's diaries have acquired importance as a counterbalancing perspective.
Anaïs Nin is hailed by many critics as one of the finest examples of writers of female
erotica. She was one of the first women to really explore the realm of erotic writing, and certainly the first prominent woman in modern Europe to write erotica. Before her, erotica written by women was virtually unheard of, except for a few writers such as
Kate Chopin. Nin, faced with a desperate need for money, wrote the stories in
Delta of Venus for a dollar a page in the
1940s.
She considered the characters in her erotica to be extreme caricature and never intended for the erotica to be published. Her writing was scandalously explicit for the time. In her unexpurgated diaries, she wrote about her incestuous relationship with her father.
Nin was a friend, and in some cases lover, of many leading literary figures, including
Henry Miller,
Edmund Wilson,
Gore Vidal,
James Agee, and
Lawrence Durrell. Her passionate love affair and friendship with Miller strongly influenced both her as a woman and an author.
Bisexual, Nin was also involved romantically during that time with Miller's wife,
June Miller, although she is not "officially" disclosed as having the affair, as described in the
Kaufman film,
Henry & June. [
2]
In
1973 she received an honorary
doctorate from Philadelphia College of Art. She was elected to the
National Institute of Arts and Letters in
1974. Anaïs Nin died of
cancer in
Los Angeles, California on
January 14 1977, her body was
cremated, and her ashes were scattered over
Santa Monica Bay.
In
1990 Philip Kaufman made the
film based on her novel
Henry & June from
The Journal of Love â€" The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932. It starred
Maria de Medeiros as Nin,
Fred Ward as Henry Miller, and
Uma Thurman as June.
To date, the combined sales of books by Anaïs Nin, including the erotica, fiction, literary criticism, and diaries, exceed 3 million.
*
D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study*
Collages*
Winter of Artifice*
Under a Glass Bell*
House of Incest*
Delta of Venus*
Little Birds*
Cities of the Interior, in five volumes:
**
Ladders to Fire**
Children of the Albatross**
The Four-Chambered Heart**
A Spy in the House of Love **
Seduction of the Minotaur*
The Diary of Anaïs Nin 7 volumes
*
The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin 4 volumes
*
The Novel of the Future*
Henry and June*
Incest*
Fire*
Nearer the Moon* Bair, Deirdre:
Anaïs Nin: A Biography. New York: Putnam 1995. ISBN 0-399-13988-5
*
Anaïs Nin dot net*
The Anaïs Nin Homepage*
The Official Anais Nin.com*
Anais Nin Cafe discussion group*
Delta of Venus*
Little Birds*
Anaïs Nin
