Anais Nin's novels' and stories, acclaimed at first only by the literary community, have gained a steadily growing audience over the years. Today, her works, which baffled readers by their unique subtlety and dreamlike precision, are translated into eight languages and are acclaimed throughout the world.
But her true life work, rumor had it, was contained in the enormous diary Miss Nin has kept since her childhood. And those who had seen glimpses of the diary reported that it would be one of the outstanding literary and biographical documents of our time. Its publication has been long awaited.
Here now is the first volume of this diary. It is as clear, as direct, as beautifully honest and simple as writing may be. It covers Miss Nin's life in Paris during the early 1930's. It provides full-length portraits of the then unknown Henry Miller, of the extraordinary surrealist poet and man of the theater Antonin Artaud, of the famous psychiatrist Dr. Otto Rank, and of many others. And it offers a fascinating record of Miss Nin's struggles to discover her own self, to come to grips with her past and her future.
The intensity, the clarity, the sensitive vision that inform these pages make them extraordinary, accessible and stimulating.
