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 Spanish father, Joaquin, was a concert pianist and composer. Nin spent her first eleven years in France: when her father deserted the family, her mother took Nin and her brothers Joaquin and Thorvald to live in New York City. Nin enrolled in the public schools, but, as legend has it, she found that education not to her liking, withdrew from John Jasper School (P.S. 9) in 1918, and became an autodidact in the public libraries. Approximately five years later, around age twenty-one, she married Hugh Guiler, a Philadelphian who, as Ian Hugo, became known as a filmmaker, engraver, and illustrator of Nin's books. She moved to Paris sometime thereafter, presumably with her husband. Little is known of Nin's life in...