Anais Nin
Anais Nin's writing chronicled the inner life of a woman, exploring sexuality, human behavior, and the creative life. Nin was born in France in 1903 to Rosa Culmell, a classically trained singer and Joaquin Nin, a pianist and composer. When her father deserted the family, her mother brought the children to New York in 1914. Nin married Hugh Parker Guiler in 1923 and the couple moved to Paris where Nin began writing fiction, including House of Incest (1932). In Paris, she met the American writer Henry Miller with whom she had an affair; their correspondence was published in 1987 as A Literary Passion. During the early 1940s, Nin wrote the short erotic stories collected in Delta of Venus and Little Birds, both of which were published posthumously. Along with her fiction work, Nin kept a diary, though not the chronological cataloguing of life the term diary implies. Instead, the diaries were published in seven volumes beginning in 1966 and are divided by theme, taking the form of dialogues, personal correspondences, and running commentaries. The success of these diaries popularized her earlier work and eventually made her a sought after speaker on the lecture circuit. Though Nin remained married to Hugh Guiler, she also lived with a second ‘husband’ in California, Rupert Pole, with whom she stayed with until her death in 1977.
