Events & Programs

Katy Masuga will present the story of Henry Miller’s journey from life as a down-and-out Brooklyn native to a banned and alleged pornographic Parisian writer during the 1930s.

Leaving behind an abusive, prostituting wife and her neurotic female lover in New York, a man called Henry Miller set sail in 1930 with nothing more than a few dollars in his pocket. He already had his sights set on Paris. At nearly forty, he was determined finally to live out his dream of becoming a writer.

With the publication of Tropic of Cancer in 1934, Miller's work was immediately banned for three decades. Over the course of his 88 years, Miller never lived a financially stable existence although he did have a firm reputation as a pioneering artist who paved the way for writers such as Lawrence Durrell, William S. Burroughs, and Norman Mailer. Yet, Miller’s writing is compelling not for its scandalous content but its innovative form. Miller is not simply a “bad boy of ill-repute” but an exceptional writer whose unheeded contributions to literature parallel those of his modernist contemporaries Proust, Kafka, Joyce and Beckett.

About the author
Katy Masuga received a PhD in 2007 at the University of Washington in Comparative Literature with a joint PhD in Literary Theory and Criticism. Her published works include Henry Miller and How He Got That Way, which treats six of Miller's major influences, and The Secret Violence of Henry Miller, which sets Miller in relation to the work of Blanchot, Bataille and Deleuze. She has also published on DH Lawrence, Beckett and Wittgenstein and teaches at The American University of Paris and at l'Université de Paris (III): La Sorbonne Nouvelle.