Near the end of his life, Henry Miller said that "it was woman, not man, who is the stronger sex, the superior one." He has made it known in many of his books just how much he loved women. Criticized by feminists for his use of four letter words and sexually explicit writing, Miller has long been considered the bad boy, or enfant terrible, of American literature.

What Miller did that no one else had done was take sex, slice it open and expose the innards, the entrails, and present it to you with open arms. It was a raw and honest look at sex, and life, that people had yet to come to grips with in America. The result of Miller's raw honesty was a twenty-six year ban on his books in his own country. His first autobiographical novel, "Tropic of Cancer" was first published in France in 1934 by Obelisk. While the French may have accepted Miller's writing, publication in America was not even a consideration. The U.S Post Office and Customs issued a ban on all of Miller's work from circulating in the mail, let alone from entering the country. In 1961, however, the bans were lifted and shortly after the first American edition of "Tropic of Cancer" was published by Grove Press.

With this publication came a wave of praise, criticism and fame. However, the criticism would seem to take center stage.

In 1970, Kate Millett attacked Miller in her book, "Sexual Politics." saying, "[Miller] is a compendium of American sexual neuroses" and that his "fantasy drama is sternly restricted to the dissociated adventures of cunt and prick". Millett was not the only feminist to criticize Miller's work. After the American publication, feminists seemed to line up to take aim at the writer who wrote so freely and openly about women. In Linda R. Williams' essay, "Critical Warfare and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer," she calls Miller "notoriously sexist" and his writing "violently sexual masculine writing". Susan Griffin's "Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revenge Against Nature"(1981), calls Miller a "pornographer" with a "physical love for women and a definite spiritual love for men".

What needs to be made aware is that in Miller's writing there is just as much iconographic description relating to the men as there is to the women. The men involved, whether Miller himself or his friends,
are not excluded from the explicit descriptions. However, the focus always tends to stay on the words used by Miller to describe women, and more often then not these words are called derogatory, insulting and offending by feminists, even today.

In defense of his language, Miller wrote in his essay, "Obscenity and the Law of Reflection" (New Directions, 1947), "one may be certain that there was no other idiom possible".

Whatever your view on Miller may be, there is one thing that cannot be ignored. Miller ushered in a sexual freedom that was unheard of in America at the time. Miller's goal was never to become the shock writer that so many people labeled him to be. As much as he tried to steer the attention away from his more controversial work to his more intellectual work, such as "The Colossus of Maroussi" and "The Books In My Life" they would never receive as much attention as "Tropic of Cancer."

Despite the attention, whether in praise or criticism, Miller's raw and honest look at life and sex has yet to be duplicated with the same intensity in our time.

(First published in Prose Toad, Fall 2005 issue)