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Anais Nin Biography & Facts

Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell ( AN-eye-EESS NEEN, French: [ana.is nin]; February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977) was a French-born American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories and erotica. Born to Cuban parents in France, Nin was the daughter of the composer Joaquín Nin and the classically trained singer Rosa Culmell. Nin spent her early years in Spain and Cuba, about sixteen years in Paris (1924–1940), and the remaining half of her life in the United States, where she became an established author. Nin wrote journals prolifically from age eleven until her death. Her journals, many of which were published during her lifetime, detail her private thoughts and personal relationships. Her journals also describe her marriages to Hugh Parker Guiler and Rupert Pole, in addition to her numerous affairs, including those with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and writer Henry Miller, both of whom profoundly influenced Nin and her writing. In addition to her journals, Nin wrote several novels, critical studies, essays, short stories, and volumes of erotic literature. Much of her work, including the collections of erotica Delta of Venus and Little Birds, was published posthumously amid renewed critical interest in her life and work. Nin spent her later life in Los Angeles, California, where she died of cervical cancer in 1977. She was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976. Early life Anaïs Nin was born in Neuilly, France, to Joaquín Nin, a Cuban pianist and composer, and Rosa Culmell, a classically trained Cuban singer. Her father's grandfather had fled France during the French Revolution, going first to Saint-Domingue, then New Orleans, and finally to Cuba, where he helped build the country's first railway. Nin was raised a Roman Catholic but left the church when she was 16 years old. She spent her childhood and early life in Europe. Her parents separated when she was two; her mother then moved Nin and her two brothers, Thorvald Nin and Joaquín Nin-Culmell, to Barcelona, and then to New York City, where she attended high school. Nin dropped out of high school in 1919 at age sixteen, and according to her diaries, Volume One, 1931–1934, later began working as an artist's model. After being in the United States for several years, Nin had forgotten how to speak Spanish, but retained her French and became fluent in English.On March 3, 1923, in Havana, Cuba, Nin married her first husband, American Hugh Parker Guiler (1898–1985), a banker and artist from Boston, later known as "Ian Hugo", when he became an experimental filmmaker in the late 1940s. The couple moved to Paris the following year, where Guiler pursued his banking career and Nin began to pursue her interest in writing; in her diaries she also mentions having trained as a flamenco dancer in Paris in the mid-to-late 1920s with Francisco Miralles Arnau. Her first published work was a critical 1932 evaluation of D. H. Lawrence called D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, which she wrote in sixteen days. Nin became interested in psychoanalysis and studied extensively, first with René Allendy in 1932 and then with Otto Rank. Both men eventually became her lovers, as she recounts in her Journal. On her second visit to Rank, Nin reflects on her desire to be reborn as a woman and artist. Rank, she observes, helped her move between what she could verbalize in her journals and what remained unarticulated. She discovered the quality and depth of her feelings in the wordless transitions between what she could and could not say. "As he talked, I thought of my difficulties with writing, my struggles to articulate feelings not easily expressed. Of my struggles to find a language for intuition, feeling, instincts which are, in themselves, elusive, subtle, and wordless." In late summer 1939, when residents from overseas were urged to leave France due to the approaching war, Nin left Paris and returned to New York City with her husband (Guiler was, according to his own wishes, edited out of the diaries published during Nin's lifetime; his role in her life is therefore difficult to evaluate). During the war, Nin sent her books to Frances Steloff of the Gotham Book Mart in New York for safekeeping. In New York, Nin rejoined Otto Rank, who had previously moved there, and moved into his apartment. She actually began to act as a psychoanalyst herself, seeing patients in the room next to Rank's. She quit after several months, however, stating: "I found that I wasn't good because I wasn't objective. I was haunted by my patients. I wanted to intercede." It was in New York that she met the Japanese-American modernist photographer Soichi Sunami, who went on to photograph her for many of her books. Literary career Journals Nin's most studied works are her diaries or journals, which she began writing in her adolescence. The published journals, which span six decades, provide insight into her personal life and relationships. Nin was acquainted, often intimately, with a number of prominent authors, artists, psychoanalysts, and other figures, and wrote of them often, especially Otto Rank. Moreover, as a female author describing a primarily masculine group of celebrities, Nin's journals have acquired importance as a counterbalancing perspective. She initially wrote in French and did not begin to write in English until she was seventeen. Nin felt that French was the language of her heart, Spanish was the language of her ancestors, and English was the language of her intellect. The writing in her diaries is explicitly trilingual; she uses whichever language best expresses her thought. In the second volume of her unexpurgated journal, Incest, she wrote about her father candidly and graphically (207–15), detailing her incestuous adult sexual relationship with him. Previously unpublished works were released in A Café in Space, the Anaïs Nin Literary Journal, which includes "Anaïs Nin and Joaquín Nin y Castellanos: Prelude to a Symphony – Letters between a father and daughter". So far sixteen volumes of her journals have been published. All but the last five of her adult journals are in expurgated form. Erotic writings Nin is hailed by many critics as one of the finest writers of female erotica. She was one of the first women known to explore fully the realm of erotic writing, and certainly the first prominent woman in the modern West known to write erotica. Before her, erotica acknowledged to be written by women was rare, with a few notable exceptions, such as the work of Kate Chopin. Nin often cited authors Djuna Barnes and D. H. Lawrence as inspirations, and she states in Volume One of her diaries that she drew inspiration from Marcel Proust, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Paul Valéry, and Arthur Rimbaud. According to Volume One of her diaries, 1931–1934, published in 1966, Nin first came across erotica when she returned to Paris with her husband, mother and two brothers in her late teens. T.... Discover the Anais Nin popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Anais Nin books.