Black Spring Author:Henry Miller Black Spring is Henry Miller's second book written between "Tropic of Cancer" and "Tropic of Capricorn" in 1936. It contains a number of linked episodes that describe some of the most crucial years of the Miller saga, and in the opinion of most critics is in many ways his most distinguished book stylistically. Henry Miller will be remembered in ... more »literary history less for his shock value, although he certainly shocked his own generation to a degree probably not shared by any other major twentieth century writer, than for the new qualities he brought into the modern novel: unashamed honesty, the search for truth and self-revelation in everyday living, rather than in ivory towers, and an acceptance of life as something to be enjoyed with gusto and appetite.
"Black Spring" is autobiographical and Miller does not pretend to have been a saint. He tells of his life as he lived it, bon viveur and roaring boy when circumstances permitted, able to doss sown anywhere and with anyone when his luck ran out, always good humoured and affectionately bonhomous to his friends, with a randy eye to a sexual opportunity where women were concerned. He is the father figure of the "beat generation", the man who did as much as anyone to free American literature from its periods of moralistic social commitment and claustrophobic self-examination. A born storyteller, Miller chronicles his life and times with great humour and he is undoubtedly on the most enjoyably readable, as well as irreverently outspoken, major writers of our day.« less