The Brave Wild Coast: A Year With Henry Miller

"The Brave Wild Coast" is the first eye-witness account of Henry Miller's sojourn on California's Big Sur coast -- the years of "The Rosy Crucifixion" -- and of the novelist's marriage with his third wife, Marta Lepska. Miller, the idol of the young poet who came to live for a year in the Big Sur non- colony (and briefly to share a cabin with Henry), emerges as neither idol nor villain, but as a man both courteous and vain, thoughtless and magnanimous, wise and nave. In episodes sometimes poignant, often hilarious, the book also shows us a post-bohemian, pre-hippie community practicing an ethos of freedom -- which included the nude bathing at Murphy's Hot Springs, now the heart of Esalen Institute, of which Crews was briefly the caretaker.