SOURCE: “Henry Miller's Democratic Vistas,” in The Expatriate Perspective, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974, pp. 156-172.

In the following excerpt, McCarthy examines the reasons Henry Miller left New York City for Paris in the early 1930s, and discusses Miller's depiction of the city as the antithesis of American racial segregation.

I

When Henry Miller settled down in Paris in 1930, it was with no mere sense of being an expatriate. He believed that he had died and been reborn. From this time he dated his birth as a creative artist and the beginning of the “auto-hero,” “Henry Miller,” whose past and present being he was to examine throughout the whole decade of the thirties, which he spent mainly in Paris. From this time he became a citizen of the universe, occupant of that “enormous womb” that reached to and included the most distant stars. And from this time he began...