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Anaïs Nin (pronounced // "ana-EESE neen") (February 21 1903 - January 14 1977) was a French-born author of Catalan, Cuban, and Danish descent who became famous for her published diaries, which span more than sixty years, beginning when she was eleven years old and ending shortly before her death, as well as for her erotica.
For many years, Anaïs Nin maintained a double life as a bigamist. Her first husband was Hugh Guiler, a banker and artist, whom she married as a young woman in the 1920s. Her second husband was Rupert Pole, a forester and step-grandson of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, whom she married in 1955 while still married to Guiler. Both men were apparently unaware of Nin's double life and did not meet until after Nin's death in 1977. After the death of Hugh Guiler in 1985, the unexpurgated, or uncensored, versions of her diaries were commissioned by Rupert Pole. *
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Early life
Anaïs Nin was born in Neuilly, France. After her parents separated, her mother moved Anaïs and her two brothers, Thorvald Nin and Joaquin Nin-Culmell to New York City. While still a teenager, Nin abandoned formal schooling and began working as a model.
On 3 March 1923, she married Hugh Parker Guiler (1898-1985). The couple moved to Paris the following year, where Guiler pursued his banking career and Nin began to pursue her interest in writing, where her first published work was a critical evaluation of D. H. Lawrence called "D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study." She also explored the field of psychotherapy, studying under the likes of Otto Rank, a disciple of Sigmund Freud. In 1939, Nin and Guiler moved back to New York City.
Nin appeared in the Kenneth Anger film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) as Astarte, the Maya Deren film Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), and a film directed by Guiler under the name Ian Hugo, Bells of Atlantis (1952).
She entered into a second, bigamous marriage to Rupert Pole, which took place in Quartzsite, Arizona on 17 March 1955, before she and Pole returned to live in California. Guiler remained in New York City and was unaware of Nin's second marriage until after her death in 1977.
She often cited authors Djuna Barnes and D. H. Lawrence as inspirations.
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The Diaries
Anaïs Nin is perhaps most famous as a diarist. Her diaries, which span several decades, are fascinating for many reasons. Nin was acquainted, often quite intimately, with a number of prominent authors, artists, and psychoanalysts, among other famous figures. Her diaries portray these persons in an unusual depth of analysis and frankness of description. Moreover, as a female author describing a primarily masculine constellation of celebrities, Nin's diaries have acquired importance as a counterbalancing perspective.
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Erotic writings
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Anaïs Nin is hailed by many critics as one of the finest examples of writers of female erotica. She was one of the first women to really explore the realm of erotic writing, and certainly the first prominent woman in modern Europe to write erotica. Before her, erotica written by women was virtually unheard of, except for a few writers such as Kate Chopin. Nin, faced with a desperate need for money, wrote the stories in Delta of Venus for a dollar a page in the 1940s.
She considered the characters in her erotica to be extreme caricature and never intended for the erotica to be published. Her writing was scandalously explicit for the time. In her unexpurgated diaries, she wrote about her incestuous relationship with her father.
Nin was a friend, and in some cases lover, of many leading literary figures, including Henry Miller, Antonin Artaud, Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal, James Agee, and Lawrence Durrell. Her passionate love affair and friendship with Miller strongly influenced her as both a woman and an author. Bisexual, Nin was also involved romantically during that time with Miller's wife, June Miller, although she is not "officially" disclosed as having the affair, as described in the Kaufman film, Henry & June. *
In 1973 she received an honorary doctorate from the Philadelphia College of Art. She was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1974. Anaïs Nin died of cancer in Los Angeles, California on January 14 1977. Her body was cremated, and her ashes were scattered over Santa Monica Bay.
In 1990 Philip Kaufman made the film based on her novel Henry & June from The Journal of Love — The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932. It starred Maria de Medeiros as Nin, Fred Ward as Henry Miller, and Uma Thurman as June. The film became famous as the first film given the NC-17 rating by the Motion Picture Association of America.
To date, the combined sales of books by Anaïs Nin, including the erotica, fiction, literary criticism, and diaries, exceed 3 million.
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List of works
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