Anais Nin (ca. 1903-1977) is best known for her erotica and for her seven volumes of diaries published from 1966 to the end of her life.Nin's other works, which include novels and short stories, are g...
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Anais Nin, author of fiction, criticism, and diaries, was born to artistic parents in Neuilly, France, outside Paris, on 21 February 1903. Her mother, Rosa Culmell Nin, a French-Dane, sang; her Spanis...
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Of all the American expatriates in Paris between 1920 and 1940, Anais Nin was one of the few repatriates. She was born in Neuilly, outside Paris, to artistic parents. Her father, Joaquin, was a pianis...
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The stories and novels of Anaïs Nin are highly distinctive creations of a groundbreaking writer who helped to define a feminine tradition in literature. Daring and determined, she broke through...
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Critical Essay by Duane Schneider
The intriguing and engaging narrator of Anaïs Nin's Diary has surely earned for herself a place among the great literary creations to appear in this ce...
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Critical Essay by J. S. Atherton
A maternal figure at times, [Nin] encouraged, for example, both Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller; especially Miller, whom she supported financially for some time as ...
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Critical Essay by Wallace Fowlie
"Linotte" is the name [Anaïs Nin] gives herself as she signs letters to her father, Joaquin Nin, the Spanish composer and pianist. It is an old-w...
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Critical Essay by Nancy Pepper
Anaïs Nin's diary served as her mirror, her confidant, the only place where she was truly herself and scrupulously honest about even unpleasant truths. Fo...
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Critical Essay by Carla Waldemar
By nature sensitive, introspective, and emotional, this intense and gifted young girl pours out [in Linotte: The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin 1914–1920] the...
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Critical Essay by Henry Miller
As I write these lines Anaïs Nin has begun the fiftieth volume of her diary, the record of a twenty-year struggle towards self-realization. Still a young woman, ...
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Critical Essay by Sharon Spencer
There is a particular sense in which Anaïs Nin's art is related to the Surrealist ideal of magical creation through combinations of entities drawn from ...
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Critical Essay by Blake Morrison
For readers who find it hard to stay with Anais Nin's novels for more than several pages (no, let's be fair: for more than one page), the publication of...
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Critical Essay by Emma Fisher
In fiction [Anais Nin] tried to do something new, and she saw it as intricately linked with the fact that she was a woman; she was anti-intellectual, relying on feeling,...
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In the following essay, McEvilly interprets Nin's writing in her diary as a poetic examination of the self.
("I'm the alchemist, not the ego." Nin)
In the world of Pr...
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In the following interview, Nin and Freeman discuss the nature of diary writing, in particular the lack of integrity of individual personality over a lifetime and differences between life as lived and...
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In the following essay, Jaas discusses Nin's influence on the poetic and personal explorations of the poet Robert Duncan, particularly in light of their respective diary-writing.
His portrai...
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In the following essay, Schneider traces the evolution of the narrator in the Diary, contrasting the persona therein with Nin herself and maintaining that the Diary's narrator is a literary cre...
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In the following essay, Kamboureli distinguishes between purveyors of erotica from those of pornography, attempting to establish Nin's Erotica as pornography wherein she focuses as much on poet...
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