Anaïs Nin
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Anaïs Nin (pronounced /ana'i:s nin/ "ana-EESE neen") (February 21 1903 - January 14 1977) was a French-born author of Catalan 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.
After the deaths of Anaïs Nin and her first husband, Hugh Guiler, the unexpurgated, or uncensored, versions of her diaries were commissioned by her second husband, Rupert Pole, and published to great interest and acclaim.
Early life
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".
The Diaries
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.
Erotic writings
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 women 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. [link]
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 — 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. She often cited that much of her inspiration as a writer came from the legacy of author Djuna Barnes.
To date, the combined sales of books by Anaïs Nin, including the erotica, fiction, literary criticism, and diaries, exceed 3 million.
List of works
- 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
References
- Bair, Deirdre: . New York: Putnam 1995. ISBN 0-399-13988-5
External links
- [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]
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