Anaïs : the erotic life of Anaïs Nin / Noël Riley Fitch.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fitch, Noel Riley.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Nin, Anaïs, 1903-1977.

Nin, Anaïs.

Women and literature--United States--History--20th century.

Women and literature.

Women authors, American--Sexual behavior.

Women authors, American.

Erotic literature, American--Women authors.

Erotic literature, American.

United States.

History.

Erotic literature, American--History and criticism.

Authors, American--20th century--Biography.

Authors, American.

Erotic literature, American--Women authors--History and criticism.

Nin, Anaı̈s, 1903-1977.

Local Subjects:

Nin, Anaı̈s, 1903-1977.

Genre:

Biographies.

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Fitch, Noel Riley (autograph) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

525 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Boston : Little, Brown, [1993]

Summary:

Anais Nin was the ultimate femme fatale, a passionate and mysterious woman, world famous for her steamy love affairs and extravagant sexual exploits, most notably her simultaneous affairs with Henry and June Miller and her bicoastal bigamous marriages. In the mid-1920s, eager to break the confines of American Victorianism both as an artist and as a woman, Nin traveled to Paris, where she fell in with the legendary artistic and literary circles of the Left Bank. For the rest of her long life she lived as a liberated woman - an author of more than a dozen books of fiction and erotica, an uninhibited lover of both men and women, and an independent figure within the avant-garde worlds of Paris, Los Angeles, and New York. Nin's Diary, published over the years in numerous volumes, has been hailed as a breakthrough document by literary critics and feminists alike. It is studied in universities across the country, and Kate Millett called it "the first real portrait of the artist as a woman." Yet in the published diary, for all its elaborate detail, Nin did not lay bare her true self. She instead constructed herself for her imagined readers, presenting on those pages a carefully stylized image of the woman the world knew as "Anais" while keeping her inner self hidden in a literary labyrinth of mirrors. Now, in Anais, the first intimate examination of Nin's life, biographer Noel Riley Fitch presents an honest portrait of Nin's passionate, tumultuous, and sometimes bitterly painful life. Fitch reveals, among other things, that behind Nin's coquetry was the desperate yearning of an abused and abandoned girl-child, a lifelong insecurity that resulted in an incestuous reunion with her father when she was thirty years old. A long-awaited account, this book will complement, correct, and demystify the image that Nin so artfully crafted in her diary.

Contents:

1. Too Much Reality

2. Passion and Penitence

3. Portrait of a Wife

4. Intimate Betrayal

5. A Literary Passion and a Passion for Literature

6. A Season in Hell

7. Drifting Toward War: Publishing and Politics

8. Village Life: Starting Over

9. This Hunger for Acceptance

10. Changing and Turning: Beginning the Bicoastal Life

11. The Diary of Others

12. Dancing Toward Daylight

Anais Nin Selected Bibliography.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 498-510) and index.

Local Notes:

Gotham Book Mart Collection copy has dustjacket retained.

Gotham Book Mart Collection copy signed by the author.

ISBN:

0316284289 :

9780316284288

0316284319

9780316284318

OCLC:

27680353