June Miller

On a snowy day in February 1930, Henry Miller boarded a ship in the New York Harbor and set sail for London—the first stop on a journey that eventually led him to a new life in Paris where he began writing the novels that made him famous.

Eve Adams, a peripatetic bookseller in Montparnasse who had been deported from America, helped Henry Miller promote Tropic of Cancer to a general audience on the terrasses of popular expatriate cafes.

In 1930, with the help of a pair of Paris guidebooks, Henry Miller greatly broadened his knowledge of his adopted city and its history.

The origins of Henry Miller’s second wife, June Smerth, have long remained a mystery. Newly found documents help to clarify the Smerth family’s life in Europe before emigrating to the US.

I recently had a few hours to kill in New York City before heading out to the airport, so I decided to snap some photos of Henry Miller sites around Greenwich Village.

The American Express office at 11 rue Scribe has been serving tourists in Paris for more than one hundred years since its opening in 1900. Henry Miller made extensive use of these services throughout his years in Paris as the American Express grew to be strongly associated with his personal misery.