I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Sometimes the books most restrained about sex, even deeply scandalized by it, can whisper to us with the greatest hidden force. I am a huge admirer of the recently deceased, always underranked Evan S. Connell.
Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.
There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.
Far more women read fiction than men, and because of this, novels have become marginalised as serious texts.
It would be hard to exaggerate Ernest Hemingway's influence over American literature, but his influence on our lives is probably larger still.
I find that nonfiction writers are the likeliest to turn out interesting novels.
I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.
I've written fiction... but the nonfiction has always received the most attention.
Most writers have been influenced by Faulkner.
I had the idea in my twenties that a writer could immediately become the late Henry James. Henry James himself had to mature. Even Saul Bellow did.
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