Henry Miller was born in New York City in 1891 and grew up in Brooklyn, the son of a tailor. For years he lived the life of a frustrated writer: he worked odd jobs, including several years as an employment manager at the Western Union telegraph company, married twice, and filled drawers with writing nobody would publish.

In 1930, at nearly forty, he left for Paris with almost nothing. He slept on friends’ floors, cadged meals, wandered the streets, and wrote. What he wrote was Tropic of Cancer, a novel about his own hungry, sex-mad, joyful life among the down-and-out artists of Depression-era Paris. It is part novel, part rant, part prose poem, and it reads like nothing written before it. The writer Anaïs Nin, who became his lover and his champion, helped pay for its first printing, and it was published in Paris in 1934.

In the United States, it was banned. For almost thirty years, Americans who wanted to read it had to smuggle copies home from France. Writers passed them around like contraband. When Grove Press finally published it in America in 1961, it set off dozens of obscenity trials around the country, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled for the book in 1964. The decision helped open the door for a generation of freer American writing.

Miller kept writing in the same spirit: Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn, and The Colossus of Maroussi, a joyful book about Greece that he considered his best. In 1944 he settled at Big Sur, on the wild California coast, where he lived for many years, painted watercolors, and received pilgrims. He also wrote a short book about Rimbaud, The Time of the Assassins.

To many of the Beats and the writers who came after them, Miller was a patron saint of freedom: a writer who put his whole life on the page and dared the world to stop him. He died in California in 1980, at 88.