The Durrell-Miller Letters: 1935-1980

By Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell

Book Overview

In 1935 a young Englishman living on Corfu wrote enthusiastically to a middle-aged Brooklynite who had just published a succ s de scandale in Paris: "...Tropic of Cancer] turns the corner into a new life which has regained its bowels." Henry Miller, realizing that in Lawrence Durrell he had hooked his ideal reader, responded: "You're the first Britisher who's written me an intelligent letter about the book." Thus began a correspondence that ended only with Miller's death in 1980--nearly 1,000,000 words later. The Durrell-Miller Letters, 1935-80 contains an extensive and representative selection of the total correspondence. Almost half of the present volume has never been published before, including some recently recovered "lost" letters; in addition, many passages expurgated from letters published in 1963 have been restored. Editor Ian S. MacNiven of the State University of New York, Maritime College, is quite right to regard the Durrell-Miller correspondence as a dual biography of the creative lives of two of this century's great literary iconoclasts, a biography "At once as serious as Schopenhauer and as winning as wine."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811217302
• ISBN13: 9780811217309
• Release Date: September 1998
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 556 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Two great writers in a lifelong epistolary friendship...

It is well-known that Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller became friends after Durrell wrote a letter to Miller in Paris, praising the latter's 'Tropic of Cancer' when it was still banned both in Britain and the United States. What devolved from this sincere letter of praise is shown in this volume, a successor to the 'Durrell-Miller Letters' of thirty years ago. Of necessity more complete than its predecessor, the 'Durrell-Miller Letters: 1935-80' tells a story in its own right of the lives of two great friends, who met over a book and stayed the course for the next forty-five years.In these pages we find Durrell, always in exile no matter where he has chosen to settle, be it England, Corfu, Cyprus, Argentinia, Yugoslavia, Egypt or France, writing to Miller, an American first abroad in Paris then returned to the United States, to New York and eventually to Big Sur, where he was to live for most of the rest of his life. Over the course of the letters a remarkable friendship blossomed, one which withstood the tests of distance and age with remarkable fortitude, and which only death eventually ended. The letters are often exuberant, coarse, and amusing; they chronicle the developing literary and personal fortunes of two remarkable men: one the author of some of the most controversial books of the twentieth century, the other author of the much-praised Alexandria Quartet, as well as countless volumes of poetry, drama, and travel writing.Introduced and annotated by Ian MacNiven, Durrell's official biographer, and completed two years before Durrell's death in 1990, this volume is a marvellous addition to the library of any reader of either Durrell or Miller, or anyone who appreciates seeing at first hand the inner workings of rare and unique minds.