The author Anais Nin was born Angela Anais Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell on 21 February 1903 in Neuilly France. She is best known for her journals, which span over sixty years, and her erotic writings. Nin began keeping a journal when she was eleven years old. She continued to journal until shortly before her death on 14 January 1977.
Anais Nin was born to parents Joaquin Nin, a Cuban pianist and composer, and Rosa Culmell a Cuban singer. Nin's mother was of Danish and French ancestry. She had two brothers, Thorvald Nin and Joaquin Nin-Culmell. When her parents separated, Nin's mother took her along with her two brothers from Barcelona, where they had been living, to New York City. The author's famed diaries indicate that she left formal schooling when she was sixteen years old to begin work as a model.
Anais Nin married her first husband on 3 March 1923, in Havana, Cuba. Hugh Parker Guiler, later known as Ian Hugo, was a banker and an artist. He changed his name when he began making experimental films in the late 1940s. Shortly after marrying, the couple moved to Paris where Nin pursued her interest in the craft of writing. During the course of her life, Anais Nin maintained romantic relationships with men other than her husband, most notably with author Henry Miller. She married a second time Rupert Pole, a man sixteen years her junior.
Anais Nin's first published works, such as D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, were nonfiction. Following the publication of her critical evaluation of D. H. Lawrence and over the course of her career, Anais Nin published the following works:
- Collages
- Winter of Artifice
- Under a Glass Bell
- House of Incest
- Delta of Venus
- Little Birds
- Cities of the Interior
- The Diary of Anaïs Nin
- The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin
- The Novel of the Future
- In Favor of the Sensitive Man
- Henry and June
- Incest
- Fire
- Nearer the Moon
The Diary of Anais Nin was published in seven volumes. The Early Diary of Anais Nin was published in four volumes. Cities of the Interior was published in five volumes, each with its own title. The titles from Cities of the Interior are: Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love, and Seduction of the Minotaur.
Four years before her death, Nin was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Philadelphia College of Art.