Autobiography: My Life and Times

Overview
Henry Miller’s My Life and Times is a late-career self-portrait assembled as a mosaic rather than a straight chronological memoir. Instead of a conventional narrative, Miller interleaves anecdotes, reflections, and images to recreate the lived texture of his years. The result is an intimate collage that moves fluidly between memory and meditation, charting how a Brooklyn boy, stifled by routine and middle-class propriety, became the scandalous and celebrated author of Tropic of Cancer and a champion of artistic freedom.

Brooklyn Beginnings
Miller recalls his childhood in a German American household in Brooklyn: a tailor for a father, a formidable mother, a neighborhood alive with stoops, shop windows, and street talk. He sketches the early tastes that shaped him, music halls, cheap novels, the pull of libraries and dance floors, alongside the dull grind of early jobs that taught him what he did not want. These pages show the seedbed of his defiance: the refusal to be pinned to a desk or tamed by respectability, the itch to wander, and the intuition that writing must be drawn from the raw nerve of experience.

Love, June, and the Leap to Art
The book circles back again and again to the combustible romance with June, the great muse of The Rosy Crucifixion, who pushed and tormented him toward a life in art. Their turbulent bond becomes Miller’s emblem for risk, eros, and transformation. The fragments from this period blend erotic candor with comic squalor, revealing how desperation and desire forged a new voice: not polite literature but an unbuttoned monologue aimed at truth, however indecorous.

Paris and the Breakthrough
Paris in the 1930s arrives as liberation, cafés, garrets, friendships with fellow expatriates, and poverty that doubled as apprenticeship. Miller evokes days of hunger and nights of talk, the brothels and bohemia, the exhilaration of discovering that he could write as he spoke. Tropic of Cancer emerges here less as a book than as a stance: a wager that life and language should be one continuous flow, contemptuous of censorship and false piety. He records the joy and the backlash, the European acclaim, the American bans, and the scandal that would trail him for decades.

America Revisited and Big Sur
Returning on the eve of war, Miller traverses the United States with the eye of an alien. He registers the glitter and emptiness of consumer culture, the hard angles of cities, the spiritual fatigue behind neon brightness. Big Sur becomes the counterpoint, a refuge where he paints watercolors, raises children, and gathers a shifting community of friends, admirers, and drifters. In these pages the notorious provocateur looks like a homesteader of the inner life, building a daily practice of work, play, and talk.

Censorship, Philosophy, and Late Recognition
Miller tracks the slow unshackling of his books in America, as court fights and shifting mores finally bring legitimacy. He treats the controversies not as triumphs of scandal but as milestones in a broader struggle for the freedom of the imagination. Threaded through are statements of his credo: that sex is not a specialty but a current running through existence; that art should be a living correspondence with the world; that laughter is a solvent for fear; and that the good life relies on friendship, music, and a measure of idleness.

Voice and Form
True to its title, My Life and Times reads like a conversation with the older Miller, earthy, amused, self-mocking, sometimes tender, sometimes boastful. Photographs, brief reminiscences, and shards from past writings knit together into a portrait that resists tidiness. The book does not close a life so much as keep it in motion, letting memory flare and overlap, until what remains is the sensibility itself: restless, unashamed, and convinced that to write is to live more intensely.