Miller’s experiences as an expatriate were the perfect material to draw inspiration from all of his works from Tropic of Cancer onward would be a sort of enhanced autobiography. He was now a true expatriate author in a city that could never truly be his own. Miller had rediscovered himself far away from his native New York.

I am the happiest man alive” ( Cancer 1). In that novel’s first page, Miller would declare, “I have no money, no resources, no hopes. Toward the end of 1931 Miller met Anaïs Nin (and her husband, Hugh Guiler), and began an historic extramarital affair that lasted for years and would ultimately provide for all of his needs in Paris, as well as inspiration for numerous stories, and for the publication of his first (published) novel, Tropic of Cancer (1934). Miller wrote what he encountered in the city in a fictionalized, autobiographic style. Miller often explored the Parisian streets and back alleys in search of experiences to write about Paris was “both the ‘book’ he read by day and the work he composed by night” (Kennedy, 146). For his first year in Paris, Miller struggled to make ends meet, with most of his meals coming courtesy of friends and expatriates he had met in the city, writing when he could afford the time. He left behind three unpublished books, a dead-end job and his second wife, June, in exchange for a fresh start in the old world, right in the middle of the Great Depression. When he moved to Paris in 1930 (at the beginning of a far less glorious decade, when authors like Malcolm Cowley had already long since returned home) Miller was nearly forty. Henry Miller came to writing, and to expatriatism, considerably later than most other writers of his generation. Matthew Miller on “Henry Miller: Rebirth in Exile”

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