Anaïs Nin

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Anaïs Nin (February 21 1903 - January 14 1977) was a French author 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.

Anaïs Nin was born in Neuilly, France. After her parents separated, her mother moved Anaïs and her two brothers 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.

Anaïs Nin is hailed by many critics as one of the finest examples of writers of female erotica. She was the first woman to really explore the realm. 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 sexual and romantic 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 (and his wife, June, with whom she did not have an affair as described in the Kaufman film, Henry & June) strongly influenced both the woman and the author.

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.

To date, the combined sales of books by Anaïs Nin, including the erotica, fiction, literary criticism, and diaries, exceed 3 million.