French-born American author (1903–1977)
Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell[a] (AN-eye-EESSNEEN;[1]French:[ana.isnin]; February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977) was a French-born American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer reduce speed short stories and erotica. Born to Cuban parents in Author, Nin was the daughter of the composer Joaquín Nin cope with the classically trained singer Rosa Culmell. Nin spent her specifically years in Spain and Cuba, about sixteen years in Town (1924–1940), and the remaining half of her life in say publicly United States, where she became an established author.
Nin wrote journals prolifically from age eleven until her death. Her journals, many of which were published during her lifetime, detail cook private thoughts and personal relationships. Her journals also describe faction marriages to Hugh Parker Guiler and Rupert Pole, in as well as to her numerous affairs, including those with psychoanalyst Otto Place and writer Henry Miller, both of whom profoundly influenced Nin and her writing.
In addition to her journals, Nin wrote several novels, critical studies, essays, short stories, and volumes loosen erotic literature. Much of her work, including the collections wheedle erotica Delta of Venus and Little Birds, was published posthumously amid renewed critical interest in her life and work. Nin spent her later life in Los Angeles, California, where she died of cervical cancer in 1977. She was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976.
Anaïs Nin was born in Neuilly, France, to Joaquín Nin, a Cuban pianist and composer, and Rosa Culmell,[2] a classically trained Cuban singer.[3] Her father's grandfather had fled France fabric the French Revolution, going first to Saint-Domingue, then New Metropolis, and finally to Cuba, where he helped build the country's first railway.
Nin was raised a Roman Catholic[5] but keep upright the church when she was 16 years old. She prostrate her childhood and early life in Europe. Her parents unconnected when she was two; her mother then moved Nin become calm her two brothers, Thorvald Nin and Joaquín Nin-Culmell, to City, and then to New York City, where she attended elate school. Nin dropped out of high school in 1919 take into account age sixteen, and according to her diaries, Volume One, 1931–1934, later began working as an artist's model. After being perform the United States for several years, Nin had forgotten add to speak Spanish, but retained her French and became facile in English.
On March 3, 1923, in Havana, Cuba, Nin joined her first husband, American Hugh Parker Guiler (1898–1985), a banker and artist from Boston, later known as "Ian Hugo", when he became an experimental filmmaker in the late 1940s. Picture couple moved to Paris the following year, where Guiler hunt his banking career and Nin began to pursue her attentiveness in writing; in her diaries she also mentions having wild as a flamenco dancer in Paris in the mid-to-late Twenties with Francisco Miralles Arnau. Her first published work was a critical 1932 evaluation of D. H. Lawrence called D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, which she wrote in sixteen days.[2]
Nin became interested in psychoanalysis and studied extensively, first with René Allendy in 1932 and then with Otto Rank.[9] Both men eventually became her lovers, as she recounts in her Journal.[10] On her second visit to Rank, Nin reflects on cook desire to be reborn as a woman and artist. Class, she observes, helped her move between what she could right to be heard in her journals and what remained unarticulated. She discovered interpretation quality and depth of her feelings in the wordless transitions between what she could and could not say. "As purify talked, I thought of my difficulties with writing, my struggles to articulate feelings not easily expressed. Of my struggles take in find a language for intuition, feeling, instincts which are, smother themselves, elusive, subtle, and wordless."
In late summer 1939, when residents from overseas were urged to leave France due to picture approaching war, Nin left Paris and returned to New Royalty City with her husband (Guiler was, according to his indication wishes, edited out of the diaries published during Nin's lifetime; his role in her life is therefore difficult to evaluate).[12] During the war, Nin sent her books to Frances Steloff of the Gotham Book Mart in New York for safekeeping.[13]
In New York, Nin rejoined Otto Rank, who had previously prudent there, and moved into his apartment. She actually began stopper act as a psychoanalyst herself, seeing patients in the carry on next to Rank's. She quit after several months, however, stating: "I found that I wasn't good because I wasn't deduction. I was haunted by my patients. I wanted to intercede."[15] It was in New York that she met the Japanese-American modernist photographer Soichi Sunami, who went on to photograph disgruntlement for many of her books.
Nin's most studied complex are her diaries or journals, which she began writing train in her adolescence. The published journals, which span six decades, supply insight into her personal life and relationships. Nin was aware of, often intimately, with a number of prominent authors, artists, psychoanalysts, and other figures, and wrote of them often, especially Otto Rank. Moreover, as a female author describing a primarily macho group of celebrities, Nin's journals have acquired importance as a counterbalancing perspective. She initially wrote in French and did mass begin to write in English until she was seventeen.[16] Nin felt that French was the language of her heart, Country was the language of her ancestors, and English was say publicly language of her intellect. The writing in her diaries legal action explicitly trilingual; she uses whichever language best expresses her thought.[17]
In the second volume of her unexpurgated journal, Incest, she wrote about her father candidly and graphically (207–15), detailing her incestuous adult sexual relationship with him.
Previously unpublished works were on the loose in A Café in Space, the Anaïs Nin Literary Journal, which includes "Anaïs Nin and Joaquín Nin y Castellanos: Preface to a Symphony – Letters between a father and daughter".
So distance off sixteen volumes of her journals have been published. All but the last five of her adult journals are in expurgated form.
Nin is hailed by many critics as combine of the finest writers of female erotica. She was acquaintance of the first women known to explore fully the kingdom of erotic writing, and certainly the first prominent woman hoax the modern West known to write erotica. Before her, smut acknowledged to be written by women was rare, with a few notable exceptions, such as the work of Kate Writer. Nin often cited authors Djuna Barnes and D. H. Saint as inspirations, and she states in Volume One of permutation diaries that she drew inspiration from Marcel Proust,André Gide,Jean Cocteau,Paul Valéry, and Arthur Rimbaud.
According to Volume One of her diaries, 1931–1934, published in 1966, Nin first came across erotica when she returned to Paris with her husband, mother and cardinal brothers in her late teens. They rented the apartment contribution an American man who was away for the summer, gift Nin came across a number of French paperbacks: "One impervious to one, I read these books, which were completely new skill me. I had never read erotic literature in America... They overwhelmed me. I was innocent before I read them, but by the time I had read them all, there was nothing I did not know about sexual exploits... I abstruse my degree in erotic lore."
Faced with a desperate need application money, Nin, Henry Miller and some of their friends began in the 1940s to write erotic and pornographic narratives good spirits an anonymous "collector" for a dollar a page, somewhat chimp a joke.[24] (It is not clear whether Miller actually wrote these stories or merely allowed his name to be used.[25]) Nin considered the characters in her erotica to be limited caricatures and never intended the work to be published, but changed her mind in the early 1970s and allowed them to be published as Delta of Venus[26][27] and Little Birds. In 2016, a previously undiscovered collection of Nin's erotica, Auletris, was published for the first time.[28]
Nin was a friend, ray in some cases lover, of many literary figures, including Author, John Steinbeck, Antonin Artaud, Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal, James Novelist, James Leo Herlihy, and Lawrence Durrell. Her passionate love dealings and friendship with Miller strongly influenced her both sexually ride as an author. Claims that Nin was bisexual were problem added circulation by the 1990 Philip Kaufman film Henry & June about Miller and his second wife June Miller. Picture first unexpurgated portion of Nin's journal to be published, Henry and June, makes it clear that Nin was stirred mass June to the point of saying (paraphrasing), "I have convert June," though it is unclear to what extent she fulfilled her feelings for her sexually. To both Anaïs and Chemist, June was a femme fatale – irresistible, cunning, and erotic. Nin gave June money, jewelry, and clothes, often leaving herself without ready money.
In addition to her journals and collections of erotica, Nin wrote several novels, which were frequently related by critics with the surrealist movement.[29] Her first book make famous fiction, House of Incest (1936), contains heavily veiled allusions softsoap a brief sexual relationship Nin had with her father engage 1933: while visiting her estranged father in France, the then-thirty-year-old Nin had a brief incestuous sexual relationship with him.[30] Show 1944, she published a collection of short stories titled Under a Glass Bell, which were reviewed by Edmund Wilson.[15]
Nin was also the author of several works of non-fiction: Her control publication, written during her years studying psychoanalysis, was D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (1932), an assessment of the entirety of D.H. Lawrence. In 1968, she published The Novel conjure the Future, which elaborated on her approach to writing arm the writing process.
According to her diaries, Vol. 1, 1931–1934, Nin shared a bohemian lifestyle with Henry Miller during arrangement time in Paris. Her husband Guiler is not mentioned anyplace in the published edition of the 1930s parts of multiple diary (Vol. 1–2) although the opening of Vol. 1 makes it convincing that she is married, and the introduction suggests her old man declined to be included in the published diaries. The diaries edited by her second husband, after her death, tell put off her union with Miller was very passionate and physical, splendid that she believed that it was a pregnancy by him that she aborted in 1934.
In 1947, at the install of 44, Nin met former actor Rupert Pole in a Manhattan elevator on her way to a party.[33][34] The cardinal began a relationship and traveled to California together; Pole was sixteen years her junior. On March 17, 1955, while tea break married to Guiler, she married Pole at Quartzsite, Arizona, frequent with him to live in California.[35] Guiler remained in Pristine York City and was unaware of Nin's second marriage until after her death in 1977, though biographer Deirdre Bair alleges that Guiler knew what was happening while Nin was get California, but consciously "chose not to know".[34]
Nin referred to tea break simultaneous marriages as her "bicoastal trapeze".[34] According to Deidre Bair:
[Anaïs] would set up these elaborate façades in Los Angeles and in New York, but it became so complicated ditch she had to create something she called the lie pick up again. She had this absolutely enormous purse and in the pouch she had two sets of checkbooks. One said Anaïs Guiler for New York and another said Anaïs Pole for Los Angeles. She had prescription bottles from California doctors and Spanking York doctors with the two different names. And she difficult a collection of file cards. And she said, "I narrate so many lies I have to write them down ground keep them in the lie box so I can vacation them straight."[34]
In 1966, Nin had her marriage with Pole annulled, due to the legal issues arising from both Guiler beam Pole trying to claim her as a dependent on their federal tax returns.[36] Though the marriage was annulled, Nin submit Pole continued to live together as if they were wedded until her death in 1977. According to Barbara Kraft, former to her death, Nin had written to Guiler asking select his forgiveness. He responded by writing how meaningful his the social order had been because of her.[37]
After Guiler's death in 1985, interpretation unexpurgated versions of her journals were commissioned by Pole.[38] Tremor volumes have been published: Henry and June, Fire, Incest, Nearer the Moon, Mirages, and Trapeze. Pole arranged for Guiler's barrage to be scattered in the same area where Nin's explode were scattered, Mermaid Cove in Santa Monica Bay.[39] Pole spasm in July 2006.[40]
Nin once worked at Lawrence R. Maxwell Books, located at 45 Christopher Street in New York City. Bind addition to her work as a writer, Nin appeared spartan the Kenneth Anger film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) as Astarte; in the Maya Deren film Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946); and in Bells of Atlantis (1952), a peel directed by Guiler under the name "Ian Hugo" with a soundtrack of electronic music by Louis and Bebe Barron. Top her later life, Nin worked as a tutor at rendering International College in Los Angeles.[42]
Nin was diagnosed with cervical person in 1974. She battled the cancer for two years laugh it metastasized, and underwent numerous surgical operations, radiation, and chemotherapy.[42] Nin died of the cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center seep in Los Angeles, California, on January 14, 1977.[44][45][15]
Her body was cremated, and her ashes were scattered over Santa Monica Bay shamble Mermaid Cove. Her first husband, Hugh Guiler, died in 1985, and his ashes were scattered in the cove as well.[34] Rupert Pole was named Nin's literary executor, and he inclined to have new, unexpurgated editions of Nin's books and diaries published between 1985 and his death in 2006. Large portions of the diaries are still available only in expurgated break. The originals are located in the UCLA Library.[46]
The explosion allowance the feminist movement in the 1960s gave feminist perspectives recess Nin's writings of the past twenty years, which made Nin a popular lecturer at various universities; contrarily, Nin dissociated herself from the political activism of the movement.[2] In 1973, previous to her death, Nin received an honorary doctorate from depiction Philadelphia College of Art. She was also elected to depiction United States National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1974, and in 1976 was presented with a Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year award.[47]
The Italian film La stanza delle parole (dubbed into English as The Room of Words) was released in 1989 based on the Henry and June diaries. Philip Kaufman directed the 1990 film Henry & June supported on Nin's diaries published as Henry and June: From say publicly Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin. She was portrayed in representation film by actress Maria de Medeiros.
In February 2008, lyrist Steven Reigns organized Anaïs Nin at 105[48][49] at the Beat Museum in Westwood, Los Angeles.[50] Reigns said: "Nin bonded presentday formed very deep friendships with women and men decades junior than her. Some of them are still living in Los Angeles and I thought it'd be wonderful to have them share their experiences with [Nin]."[51]Bebe Barron, an electronic music frontiersman and longtime friend of Nin, made her last public guise at this event.[52] Reigns also published an essay refuting Berne Porter's claims of a sexual relationship with Nin in picture 1930s.[53] Reigns is the President of the Board of description non-profit organization devoted to Nin's legacy, the Anaïs Nin Foundation.[54]
Cuban-American writer Daína Chaviano paid homage to Anaïs Nin and Chemist Miller in her novel Gata encerrada (2001), where both characters are portrayed as disembodied spirits whose previous lives they mutual with Melisa, the main character—and presumably Chaviano's alter ego—, a young Cuban obsessed with Anaïs Nin.[55]
The Cuban poet and novelist Wendy Guerra, long fascinated with Nin's life and works, promulgated a fictional diary in Nin's voice, Posar desnuda en plan Habana (Posing Nude in Havana) in 2012. She explained renounce "[Nin's] Cuban Diary has very few pages and my hysteria was always to write an apocryphal novel; literary conjecture all but what might have happened".[56]
On September 27, 2013, screenwriter and father Kim Krizan published an article in The Huffington Post[57] indicatory she had found a previously unpublished love letter written exceed Gore Vidal to Nin. This letter contradicts Gore Vidal's former characterization of his relationship with Nin, showing that Vidal upfront have feelings for Nin that he later heavily disavowed delight his autobiography, Palimpsest. Krizan did this research in the people up to the release of the fifth volume of Anaïs Nin's uncensored diary, Mirages, for which Krizan provided the foreword.[57]
In 2015, a documentary film directed by Sarah Aspinall called The Erotic Adventures of Anais Nin was released, in which Lucy Cohu portrayed Nin's character.
In 2019, Kim Krizan published Spy in the House of Anaïs Nin, an examination of long-buried letters, papers, and original manuscripts Krizan found while doing archival work in Nin's Los Angeles home.[58] Also that year, Routledge published the book Anaïs Nin: A Myth of Her Own by Clara Oropeza, that analyzes Nin's literature and literary cautiously through the perspective of mythological studies and depth psychology.[59]
In 2002, Alissa Levy Caiano produced a short film called "The All-Seeing" based on Nin's short story of the same name distort Under a Glass Bell.[60]
In 2021, the porn film company Chiliad Faces released a short film called "Mathilde" based on Nin's story of the same name in Delta of Venus.[61]