Nin, Anaïs
1903–1977

A prolific author, eroticist, and arts advocate and commentator, Anïs Nin is known for her sensitive explorations and portrayals of female sensuality. Nin used ideas from psychoanalysis, surrealism, and the visual arts and dance as ways to express experiences of feminine sexuality. Nin published more then twenty-five novels and collections of work, but she is best known for her Diary, which she began writing as a child and which she started publishing in abridged versions in the 1960s.

Nin was born in Neuilly, France, on February 21, 1903. Both of her parents were musicians. Her father, Joaquín Nin, was a Catalan pianist and composer who performed internationally, and her Danish mother, Rosa, a singer. When she was eight, Nin moved to New York City with her mother after her parents had separated. On this first trip to New York, Nin began keeping what was to become her famous diary as a letter to her absent father.

Nin and her mother struggled in New York, running a boardinghouse. Nin attended school and learned English, had a brief career as a model, and finally went to Cuba to stay with a wealthy relative and find a rich husband. Hugh Guiler, whom she had first met in New York, came to Cuba in 1923, and married Nin. The two moved to Paris in 1924 where Hugh had a job in a bank. France was both a fascinating and frightening place for Nin. She wished to help her brother's career as a pianist, yet she was afraid to face her father again. She began to write and befriend artists.

After the stock market crash of 1929 forced Guiler and Nin to move to the small village of Louveciennes, Nin took her writing more seriously. While continuing to write in her diary, she had by 1931 produced her first book, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, which was published the following year. During this time as well, Nin began seeing the Austrian analyst Otto Rank, worked as a lay analyst herself, and became Rank's lover. She also became a part of the Villa Seurat group of artists that included Henry Miller. She was fascinated with Miller, and helped him survive as an impoverished writer. She began a romantic relationship with both Miller and his wife, June. Nin continued writing, publishing her prose poem House of Incest (1936); which treated her relationship with the Millers; Winter of Artifice (1939), in which she tried to work through her feelings about her father; and a collection of stories, Under a Glass Bell (1944). She became friends with the British author Lawrence Durrell, and went back and forth from Paris to New York, keeping her husband and lovers separate.

The beginning of World War II forced Americans, including Nin, back to New York, where she continued writing both her diary and a new series of novels focused on female sensuality. Enjoying the influx of artistic excitement from surrealism, admiring Miller's poetic and joyous realism, and working in tandem with her husband who had become a film maker and illustrator, Nin wrote a series of novels she titled Cities of the Interior, which included Ladders to Fire (1946), Children of the Albatross (1947), The Four-Chambered Heart (1950), A Spy in the House of Love (1954), and Solar Barque (1958). These novels focused on different types of women engaged in art and love. She also published a collection of essays on writing itself, On Writing (1947). Frustrated by difficulties she encountered trying to publish her work, Nin bought her own printing press and began to make handcrafted books. During this time as well, she wrote erotica for a dollar per page, which was collected and published posthumously as The Delta of Venus (1977).

Continuing her relation to literary culture in New York, Nin became friends with a younger generation of writers, including Gore Vidal and Robert Duncan. She appeared in a film directed by the experimental filmmaker Maya Deren. She also continued writing novels, including Seduction of the Minotaur (1961) and Collages (1964). In 1966 she published the first volume of her Diary, a volume focusing on her early experiences in Paris with the Millers. Nin's Diary volumes are not simply published versions of her day-to-day thoughts, but are crafted around themes and carefully omit mention of her husband, Hugh. Containing dialogue and rendering memories as dramatic scenes, the Diary combines the forms of confession, description, and a novelistic sensibility. Nin published seven volumes of her Diary.

The publication of the Diary spurred interest in Nin's other works, many of which were reissued in the 1960s and 1970s. In the late 1960s and early 1970s as well, Nin became a spokeswoman for the possibilities of women as artists. She conducted a lecture tour through college campuses in the United States, speaking to women's groups and raising the question of how women can also be artists given the way women have been culturally defined. She also exhorted women to participate in what she saw as the passion of art as a way to express a much needed perspective. Her lectures were collected and published in 1975.

Nin died in Los Angeles on January 14, 1977. Soon after her death, her literary estate published the erotica she had written anonymously during her life and began publishing unexpurgated versions of her diaries. A special collection of correspondence between her and Henry Miller was published as A Literary Passion (1987). Nin envisioned her role as an artist to have been a courageous one. As she said, "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." She also saw art as a passionate necessity: "If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it."

see also Miller, Henry.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bair, Deirdre. 1995. Anïs Nin: A Biography. New York: Putnam.

Fitch, Noël Riley. 1993. Anïs: The Erotic Life of Anïs Nin. Boston: Little, Brown.

Nin, Anïs. 1966–1980. The Diary of Anïs Nin, ed. Gunther Stuhlmann. Vols. 1-2, New York: Swallow Press; Vol. 3, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World; Vols. 4-7, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

                                              Judith Roof