The year was 1944. Henry Miller was living in a three-room shack in Los Angeles and he could not write. "He found no inspiration in Los Angeles at the time and was very frustrated," longtime friend Emil White said. "The people didn't inspire him, and the atmosphere of the city didn't inspire him." Miller headed north to visit a friend in Big Sur and was awed, he wrote later, by its "grandeur and eloquent silence." He immediately decided that he had found a home. Miller wrote to White, a painter who was living in Alaska at the time, that he had "discovered a place better than Mexico." White joi...
