Sexus

When Henry Miller left America for Paris in the 1930s to lead the life of a literary bohemian, he called this death of his former existence and his resurrection as a writer of ‘rosy crucifixion.’ This dramatic transformation provided the leitmotif for some of Miller’s finest writing, embodying everything he felt about self-liberation and the true life of the spirit.

Sexus, the first volume in the ‘Rosy Crucifixion’ trilogy, looks back in fictionalized format to Miller’s American life in the 1920s. Frantically seeking antidotes to his dreary job and life ‘in a morbidly respectable neighborhood’ with his wife Maude, Miller becomes obsessed with the promiscuous and mysterious Mara, dance hall hostess, femme fatale and pathological liar.

First published in Paris in 1949, this picaresque, extraordinarily candid tale of Miller’s sexual escapades amongst the low-life of Brooklyn was banned in Great Britain and America for nearly twenty years.