Henry Miller in the 21st Century

A conference will take place on the mornings of May 18th to 21st, 2027 called: “From America Sent”: Reading Henry Miller Today International Conference, The call for papers comes from: the joint sponsors: Sorbonne Université (VALE UR 4085) (link to CFP): https://vale.sorbonne-universite.fr/aac-coll-internat-18-21-05-2027-from-america-sent-reading-henry-miller-todaysorbonne-universite/,  Université Paris Nanterre (CREA UR 370) (link to CFP): https://crea.parisnanterre.fr/colloques-et-journees-detude/“from-america-sent”-reading-henry-miller-today and the HMML. The organizers include: Emma Frigo (Universités Grenoble Alpes and Paris Nanterre), Clément Oudart (Sorbonne Université), Michael Paduano (Independent scholar), Benoît Tadié (Université Paris Nanterre), Magnus Torén (Henry Miller Memorial Library)

Correspondence occupied a central place in Henry Miller’s writing life. During his years of literary apprenticeship in 1920s New York, Miller approached his correspondence as something separate from his art. “The letter writing was for me what shadow boxing is to a pugilist,” the narrator of Plexus (1952) recalls. “But imagine a pugilist spending so much time fighting his shadow that when he hooks up with a sparring partner he has no fight left! I could spend two or three hours writing a story, or article, and another six or seven explaining them to my friends by letter. The real effort was going into the letter writing, and perhaps it was best so, now that I look back on it, because it preserved the speed and naturalness of my true voice.”

It was only after arriving in Paris in the winter of 1930 that Miller began to recognize in his letters the outlines of a distinctive first-person literary persona, as well as a form that could imitate the onward flow of thought—what he later called “the circular or spiral form of progression.”

Among the most important of these letters were those sent to Miller’s boyhood friend, Emil Schnellock. The recent acquisition by the Bibliothèque nationale de France of the Emil Schnellock collection—the world’s second-largest collection of manuscripts, notes, letters, and original artwork by Miller, much of which dates from his transformative 1930s Paris period—offers a unique opportunity to reassess the epistolary dimension of Miller’s work and the wider role of personal and professional correspondence in his writing life. More broadly, it invites reflection on the role of epistolary practices in twentieth-century literary culture.

Yet the 2027 “From America Sent” conference seeks to explore correspondence not only, or even primarily, as epistolary exchange. Instead, we interpret “correspondence” in the broader sense of the term: as affinities and resonances between places, languages, media, traditions, and forms in the work of Miller, his coterie of fellow artists, and twentieth-century literature more generally.

The arrival of the Emil Schnellock collection in Paris may be understood as a kind of homecoming, one that extends beyond the material return of the archive itself. In Aller Retour New York (1935), a book-length letter addressed to Alfred Perlès, Miller signs off “from America sent,” echoing a line from Walt Whitman’s poem of global salutation, “Salut au Monde!”: “Health to you! good will to you all, from me and America sent!” Miller was acutely aware of his ambiguous position as an American writer remade in France, and of the different kinds of dialogues his work sustained within American and French literary cultures. The title of the first published review of Tropic of Cancer (1934), Blaise Cendrars’s “Un Écrivain américain nous est né,” captured something of this transatlantic identity. Miller’s work emerged from a dense web of correspondences: between New York and Paris, autobiography and fiction, American vernacular speech and European avant-garde experiment, as well as between the writers who shaped him and those who later wrote in his wake.

Such correspondences extended beyond literature. Miller was also a prolific painter, and his visual practice developed alongside his writing life. His manuscripts, notebooks, watercolors, letters, and published works invite reflection on possible correspondences between painterly and writerly modes of composition. At the same time, they raise broader genetic questions about the relation between methods of composition and the forms they produce. What kinds of texts emerge from different methods of planning, composition, and revision? How might creative habits migrate between literary and visual media?

Correspondence also suggests contemporaneity: the ways in which works from the past continue or fail to resonate with the concerns, values, and critical frameworks of the present. Nearly a century after the publication of Tropic of Cancer, Miller remains a profoundly divisive figure. Celebrated by some as a pioneering modernist and advocate of artistic freedom, he is regarded by others as a disturbing and somewhat out of step writer, whose representations of women and sexuality sit uneasily within contemporary criticism. Questions surrounding obscenity, censorship, sexual liberation, misogyny, and self-mythology continue to shape the reception of his work.

Rather than seeking to resolve these tensions, the conference welcomes critical engagement with them. How should Miller be read in an age shaped by feminist, queer, and intersectional approaches to literature? How might his work be situated within longer histories of sexual representation, counter-cultural dissent, and challenges to moral and aesthetic convention? What place, if any, should Miller occupy within contemporary literary canons, classrooms, and public culture? By bringing these questions into dialogue with archival research, transatlantic studies, and the study of artistic networks, the conference seeks to reconsider Miller’s work while also reflecting on the changing critical frameworks through which twentieth-century literature is read today.