Anaïs Nin

Born in France to Cuban parents - her father a composer, her mother a trained singer - Nin began keeping a diary at eleven and never stopped. She spent sixteen years in Paris starting in 1924, where she moved through psychoanalysis with Otto Rank and an affair with Henry Miller that fed her fiction and her sense of herself as an artist. She married twice, to Hugh Parker Guiler and Rupert Pole, overlapping both unions while writing novels, essays, and erotica she kept in a drawer. Much of the explicit work appeared only after her death from cervical cancer in Los Angeles in 1977. By then the journals had made her name - published in installments while she lived, they mapped a woman's interior life with a frankness that still lands.