Nin, Anaïs

(US, 1903–77)

Anaïs Nin lived in Paris between the wars, and trained as a psychoanalyst. Her writing was eclipsed for many years by her better-known contemporaries, but has recently been reprinted and widely read. The best introduction to her poetic style is Under a Glass Bell (1944), a collection of stories characterized by striking imagery and an unsettling clarity. A Spy in the House of Love (1954) is an atmospheric novel about a woman and her relationships with several men, and Collages (1964) is a more experimental patchwork of moods and stories that shows Nin at her most inventive. She is perhaps best known for the collection of erotica Delta of Venus (1977), which gathered pornographic stories originally written for a private collector during her years in Paris, and for the many volumes of her published diaries.

Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Elizabeth Smart  WB