MILLER, Henry.

£1,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Tropic of Cancer. First edition, third printing, presentation copy inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "To Audrey, from Henry Miller, who is now [on] the other side of the Equator, preparing to write 'Draco and the Ecliptic'", his unrealised self-reflective mystical project. Tropic of Cancer was first published in 1934; early printings are rarely found inscribed.A "poet and eccentric" (ODNB), Audrey Beecham descended from Thomas Beecham, the founder of the eponymous pharmaceuticals empire. She once took an extended holiday from her Oxford studies to run guns for the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. When she left Oxford with a second-class degree in 1937, she moved to Paris, where she befriended Miller, Anaïs Nin (who contributes the preface to Tropic), and Lawrence Durrell. Miller, the editor of Delta, published a handful of Beecham's poems in the magazine. She was fascinated with witchcraft and folklore, and "believed herself capable of casting spells and affecting friends and enemies by them" (ODNB): she and Miller presumably bonded over their shared mysticism. In the 1940s, Beecham spent much of her time in London, where she garnered a serious poetic reputation, and befriended Joe Ackerley and Dylan Thomas: "she prided herself on her mastery of martial arts and on her claim to have knocked out Dylan Thomas cold when he made unwelcome advances to her" (ODNB)To the surprise of her contemporaries, she applied for and was appointed the warden of Nightingale

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