In 2010 Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired Henry Miller's three "Paris Notebooks," which have been in private hands and read by only a few scholars over the past ninety years. They are a working writer's hodge-podge of undated diary entries, descriptions of places and people, lists, letters, rough drafts, and unpublished pieces. After close examination of the manuscripts, I assessed that these pages offer important insights, and I am writing a critical biography to expose their impact. The notebooks shed particular light on Miller's process, which seems far less "inspired" or "prophetic" and much more "workmanlike" than previously imagined. The first published result of this process, Tropic of Cancer, inspired generations of authors to write loosely autobiographical fiction, but also created a new problem when discussing these works. Many critics and even biographers conflate Henry Miller the person with the narrator or character of "Henry" in Tropic of Cancer and his other books. This is not a problem confined to scholarship on one author. Our literary culture continues to misunderstand poets and novelists who write in voices we imagine to be their own, whose "characters" speaking in On the Road or "Lady Lazarus" seem to be the same person as Jack Kerouac or Sylvia Plath, when in fact each is a persona, a voice of the moment
