MILLER, Henry

Perhaps because he didn't start writing seriously until he passed forty, Miller made the principal theme of his books his liberation from an earlier life. This liberation involved a rejection not only of the workaday world, but of its proper language. For three decades, his books were regarded as pornography; their importation into the United States was forbidden by law (and Customs officials would confiscate them from tourists). Once they were published here, in the early 1960s, abolishing state...