Henry Miller occupies a curious position in the world of fiction. He is well-known and highly regarded in countercultural circles, where he is seen as a proto-Beat and occasionally regarded as an experimental prose writer, continuing the pioneering experiments in form of Joyce, Proust and Céline. His freewheeling work prefigures various contemporary genre transgressions and the rise in literary non-fiction and life writing, yet he has been written about by academics sparingly. The predominant reason is likely his lingering reputation for writing pornography instead of literature, and perhaps his tendency to blur the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, often mixing autobiography, travel writing and literary criticism. The book at hand seeks to provide access to an unfamiliar but ambitious, challenging but rewarding, late modernist, set in relation to a significant handful of ancestral writers who arguably affected his work most profoundly.