Henry Miller

‘Bald, overweight and gluttonous’ is how the American journalist and food writer A.J. Liebling described himself. Born in Manhattan in 1904, he wrote extensively about boxing and horse racing and was a war correspondent during the second world war, taking part in the Normandy landings in that capacity. He also recounted his gastronomic adventures in Paris before the war in Between Meals, a collection of essays largely derived from a four-part series, ‘Memoirs of a Feeder in France’, which ran in the New Yorker in 1959.

Maurice Girodias was the most daring avant-garde publisher in English of the post-war era. His Paris-based Olympia Press took on Samuel Beckett at a time when no British publisher wanted him, Vladimir Nabokov when Lolita was considered unprintable, William Burroughs when The Naked Lunch was regarded as obscenely incomprehensible, The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy, as well as translations of risqué works by Jean Cocteau and other French authors. After a police raid, Terry Southern’s banned book Candy simply reappeared as Lollipop Olympia flourished for a dozen or more years from 1951.