Reading List

Authors Like Henry Miller

Q: What should I read after Tropic of Cancer?

Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Anaïs Nin’s Henry and June (1986) for the same Paris years from her side, and George Orwell’s essay “Inside the Whale” (1940), the best early account of what Miller was doing.

Q: Is Henry Miller misogynistic?

Many readers and critics think so. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) argued that his sex scenes humiliate and punish women, and it remains the most influential critique; Norman Mailer replied in his defence.

Q: Which Henry Miller book should I read first?

Tropic of Cancer (1934) is the usual start. Miller himself considered The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), about his visit to Greece in 1939 at Lawrence Durrell’s invitation, his best book, and it is the way in if you want him without the sexual explicitness.

Henry Miller was born in Yorkville, Manhattan, on 26 December 1891 and spent four years in the early 1920s at Western Union before deciding to write full time. In 1930, aged 38, he went to Paris alone, found work as a proofreader and lived largely on friends, among them Anaïs Nin and her husband, who paid his rent. Nin also paid for the first printing of Tropic of Cancer, which the Obelisk Press published in 1934 with a jacket warning that it must not be imported into the United States or Great Britain. It was banned in America until Grove Press published it in 1961; obscenity cases followed until the Supreme Court cleared it in 1964. Miller settled in Big Sur in 1944, painted an estimated 2,000 watercolours and died in Pacific Palisades in 1980. The ten writers below share his ground: the self as the whole subject, sex without apology, and the artist living hand to mouth.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Autobiographical fiction · Banned books · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Henry Miller, start with Anaïs Nin, who paid for Tropic of Cancer to be printed and wrote her own account of their affair in Henry and June. Lawrence Durrell wrote Miller a fan letter about that book and became a friend for 45 years, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night is its closest French relative. The list also includes Kate Millett, whose Sexual Politics remains the best-known case against him.

10 authors like Henry Miller

Singing the self

Walt Whitman

American · Leaves of Grass (1855), Specimen Days (1882)

Whitman was born on Long Island in 1819 and died in Camden, New Jersey, in 1892. He paid for the first edition of Leaves of Grass himself and revised and expanded it for the rest of his life. Its frankness about the body and sex cost him a government clerk’s job in 1865, and in 1882 a Boston publisher dropped the book after the district attorney threatened prosecution.

The American ancestor of Miller’s voice: a long, cataloguing, first-person song of the self, the city and the body. Orwell called Miller “a sort of Whitman among the corpses”, and the phrase sums up the difference: Miller kept Whitman’s appetite but wrote it in a darker, more broken world.

— Lisanne

Every book by Walt Whitman →

The poet who walked away

Arthur Rimbaud

French · A Season in Hell (1873), Illuminations (1886)

Rimbaud was born in Charleville in 1854, wrote almost all his poetry before he was 21 and then gave up literature to work as a trader in Aden and Harar; he died in Marseille in 1891, aged 37. A Season in Hell, a prose poem written after his violent affair with the poet Paul Verlaine, is one of the founding texts of modern poetry.

Miller wrote a whole book about him, The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud (1956), and found in Rimbaud’s revolt against family, country and literary career a version of his own. Read A Season in Hell for the visionary, ranting prose Miller tried to bring into the novel.

— Lisanne

The rant, in French

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

French · Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Death on the Installment Plan (1936)

Céline was the pen name of Louis-Ferdinand Destouches (1894–1961), a doctor who practised in the Paris suburbs. Journey to the End of the Night, a bitter, slangy first-person odyssey through the First World War, colonial Africa, Detroit and the Paris slums, won the Prix Renaudot. From 1937 he published violently antisemitic pamphlets; after the war a French court convicted him of collaboration, and in 2011 the French government dropped him from its list of national commemorations after protests.

Critics count Miller among the American writers Céline influenced, and Tropic of Cancer shares the Journey’s spoken, profane first person and its tour of Paris poverty. Céline’s despair is darker and his politics indefensible; Miller turned the same material towards joy.

— Lisanne

The other side of the affair

Anaïs Nin

French-born American · House of Incest (1936), Delta of Venus (1977), Henry and June (1986)

Nin was born in 1903 in Neuilly-sur-Seine to Cuban parents and died in Los Angeles in 1977. In Paris she and her husband Hugh Guiler supported Miller through the 1930s, and she financed the first printing of Tropic of Cancer. Henry and June, the first unexpurgated portion of her diary, published after her death, covers her affair with Miller and her fascination with his wife June in 1931 and 1932.

Read her to see Miller’s Paris from a woman inside it. Nin wrote sex and the self as frankly as he did, but in a lyrical, psychological key, and Henry and June makes Miller one of her characters rather than the hero of his own book.

— Lisanne

Every book by Anaïs Nin →

The fan letter that became a friendship

Lawrence Durrell

British · The Black Book (1938), Prospero’s Cell (1945), Justine (1957)

Durrell was born in Jalandhar, India, in 1912 and died in Sommières, France, in 1990. He wrote Miller a fan letter after finding a copy of Tropic of Cancer around 1935, and their friendship lasted about 45 years; The Black Book was published by the same Paris press. In 1939 he invited Miller to Greece, the trip behind The Colossus of Maroussi. After Durrell’s death it emerged that the diaries of his daughter Sappho, who died by suicide in 1985, included allusions to an alleged incestuous relationship with her father.

The Black Book is Durrell’s most Miller-like novel, a young man’s sexual and artistic revolt against England, and the two men argued about writing in letters for decades. With Justine and the rest of The Alexandria Quartet he turned to lush, layered romance, which shows one way out of Miller’s style.

— Lisanne

Inside the whale

George Orwell

British · Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), “Inside the Whale” (1940), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

Orwell was the pen name of Eric Blair, born in Motihari, India, in 1903; he died in London in 1950. Down and Out in Paris and London describes his time as a dishwasher in Paris and a tramp in England, a few years before Miller arrived in the same city. His essay “Inside the Whale” calls Miller “the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past”.

The writer who argues with Miller most usefully. Orwell admired him and wrote the best early essay about him, but faulted his acceptance of everything and his refusal to engage with politics as Europe moved towards war. Read “Inside the Whale” and Down and Out together for the same poverty seen with a conscience.

— Lisanne

Every book by George Orwell →

Life in one long sentence

Jack Kerouac

American · On the Road (1957), The Dharma Bums (1958), Big Sur (1962)

Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922 to French-Canadian parents and died in Florida in 1969. On the Road, based on his trips across America with Neal Cassady in the late 1940s and typed as a continuous scroll in 1951, became the defining novel of the Beat Generation. Big Sur draws on a stay in 1960 at a cabin on the same stretch of California coast where Miller had settled.

Kerouac picks up Miller’s autobiographical fiction, his rapturous prose and his contempt for the respectable American career, and takes them on the road. He is more spiritual and less sexual, and his Big Sur is a place of breakdown where Miller’s was a refuge.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jack Kerouac →

The case against him

Kate Millett

American · Sexual Politics (1970), Flying (1974), The Loony-Bin Trip (1990)

Millett was born in St Paul, Minnesota, in 1934 and died in Paris in 2017. Sexual Politics, which began as her doctoral thesis at Columbia, examines sex scenes by Miller, Norman Mailer and others in which a compliant woman is seduced and then humiliated or abused, and argues that they help keep men a ruling class; she praises Jean Genet as an exception. Mailer replied in defence of Miller.

Any honest reading list for Miller needs Millett. She reads the same pages his admirers celebrate and shows what they do to the women in them, and her chapter on him is still the starting point for that argument. Read her after Sexus.

— Lisanne

Every book by Kate Millett →

Sexual freedom, from her side

Erica Jong

American · Fear of Flying (1973), The Devil at Large (1993)

Jong was born in Manhattan in 1942. Fear of Flying, about a young poet who leaves her husband at a psychoanalysts’ conference in Vienna to travel through Europe with another man, caused a sensation for its frank treatment of women’s sexual desire and has sold more than 37 million copies. In 1993 she published The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller.

Jong took Miller’s licence to write appetite in the first person and claimed it for a woman, and she later wrote a whole book about him. Read Fear of Flying as Miller’s kind of freedom with a woman telling the story.

— Lisanne

Nothing left out

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Norwegian · My Struggle (2009–2011), The Morning Star (2020)

Knausgaard was born in Oslo in 1968. My Struggle, six volumes and more than 3,500 pages, recounts his own life in minute detail, from his father’s death to his marriage and the writing of the books themselves; members of his father’s family objected publicly to the first volume and threatened legal action. The English translation appeared between 2012 and 2018.

Knausgaard shares Miller’s decision to make his own life the whole subject and to leave nothing out, including what embarrasses him and the people around him. In tone he is Miller’s opposite: anxious, domestic and ashamed where Miller is exuberant.

— Lisanne

Every book by Karl Ove Knausgaard →

Where to start if you loved Henry Miller

If you loved Tropic of Cancer, read Céline.

Journey to the End of the Night: the profane first person and the Paris poverty, darker still.

If you want Miller’s Paris from the other side, read Anaïs Nin.

Henry and June: her diary of 1931 and 1932, with Miller as a character.

If you want the argument against him, read Kate Millett.

Sexual Politics, starting with her reading of Sexus.

If you loved The Colossus of Maroussi, read Lawrence Durrell.

Prospero’s Cell: Corfu, by the friend who brought Miller to Greece.

If you are new to Miller, start with Tropic of Cancer.

Then The Colossus of Maroussi, which he considered his best book, and Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch for his later life in California.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Henry Miller

Who writes like Henry Miller?

Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell and Louis-Ferdinand Céline are the closest: the first two were his friends, and critics count Céline among his influences. Jack Kerouac and Karl Ove Knausgaard carry on his autobiographical method, and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying writes sexual freedom from a woman’s side.

What should I read after Tropic of Cancer?

Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Anaïs Nin’s Henry and June (1986) for the same Paris years from her side, and George Orwell’s essay “Inside the Whale” (1940), the best early account of what Miller was doing.

Why was Tropic of Cancer banned?

It was published in Paris in 1934 and banned in the United States as obscene for its explicit sex. Grove Press published it there in 1961, obscenity cases followed, and in 1964 the Supreme Court, in Grove Press v. Gerstein, overturned the findings against it.

Is Henry Miller misogynistic?

Many readers and critics think so. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) argued that his sex scenes humiliate and punish women, and it remains the most influential critique; Norman Mailer replied in his defence.

Which Henry Miller book should I read first?

Tropic of Cancer (1934) is the usual start. Miller himself considered The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), about his visit to Greece in 1939 at Lawrence Durrell’s invitation, his best book, and it is the way in if you want him without the sexual explicitness.

Is Henry Miller like Jack Kerouac?

Both wrote autobiographical novels in a rushing first person, rejected the respectable American career and wrote about the Big Sur coast. Miller is more sexual and philosophical; Kerouac more spiritual and restless.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

Authors Like Henry Miller

10 authors like Henry Miller

Walt Whitman

Arthur Rimbaud

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Anaïs Nin

Lawrence Durrell

George Orwell

Jack Kerouac

Kate Millett

Erica Jong

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Where to start if you loved Henry Miller

Frequently asked questions about authors like Henry Miller

Who writes like Henry Miller?

What should I read after Tropic of Cancer?

Why was Tropic of Cancer banned?

Is Henry Miller misogynistic?

Which Henry Miller book should I read first?

Is Henry Miller like Jack Kerouac?

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