Past Perfect: A Novelist Among the Ruins

In 940, with fascism, communism and democracy colliding violently around it, Greece was hardly an ideal tourist destination. But for Henry Miller, whose bold and sexually frank novels Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1938) had fueled an uproar in the United States, it was the perfect time for a sojourn in another world. He spent much of his five-month stay with the English writer Lawrence Durrell, traveling back and forth between Athens and the Mediterranean island of Corfu, where Durrell lived with his wife. Despite the intense summer heat, Miller fell in love with Greece—and with […]