Anais Nin was born in France. Her father was the Spanish composer Joaquin Nin, her mother Cuban, French and Danish. She moved to the United States in 1914 after her father deserted the family, where she attended Catholic schools, dropped out of school, worked as a model and dancer and returned to Europe in 1923.
Anais Nin studied psychoanalysis with Otto Rank and briefly practiced as a lay therapist in New York. She was a patient of Carl Jung for a time as well.
Finding it difficult to get her erotic stories published, Anais Nin helped found Siana Editions in France in 1935. By 1939 and the outbreak of World War II she returned to New York, where she became a figure in the Greenwich Village crowd.
An obscure literary figure for most of her life, when her journals -- kept since 1931 -- began to be published in 1966, she entered the public eye. The ten volumes of The Diary of Ana�s Nin have remained popular. These are more than simple diaries; each volume has a theme, and were likely written with the intent that they later be published. Letters she exchanged with intimate friends, including Henry Miller, have also been published. The popularity of the diaries brought interest in her previously-published novels. The Delta of Venus and Little Birds, originally written in the 1940s, were published after her death (1977, 1979).
Anais Nin is known, as well, for her lovers, who included Henry Miller, Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal and Otto Rank. She was married to Hugh Guilar Nin of New York who tolerated her affairs and a second, bigamous marriage to Rupert Cole in California.
The ideas of Anais Nin about "masculine" and "feminine" natures have influenced that part of the feminist movement known as "difference feminism." She disassociated herself late in her life from the more political forms of feminism, believing that self-knowledge through journaling was the source of personal liberation
~Woman in History
For Anais Nin quotations and excerpts from her diaries, go HERE |
