Anaïs Nin

Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1903 and dead in Los Angeles in 1977, Anaïs Nin kept a journal from the age of eleven until the end of her life — an act of sustained self-documentation that eventually ran to many thousands of pages. She was a novelist and essayist too, and later a writer of erotica, but it is the diary that made her: when the first volume appeared in 1966, it turned a private habit into a public literary event. Volume One covers 1931–1934, the Paris years, when she was in her late twenties and moving among writers including Henry Miller. After her death her second husband Rupert Pole, her literary executor, commissioned the fuller unexpurgated editions; the Anaïs Nin Foundation now manages her literary legacy.