Anais Nin's second work of fiction, The Winter of Artifice, was, according to Nin, her only banned book. Published in France in 1939, it consisted of 3 novellas, each of which fictionalized an important event in Nin's life: her affair with Henry and June Miller ("Hans and Johanna"), her incestuous relationship with her father ("Lilith"), and her relationship with Otto Rank ("The Voice"). When Nin smuggled copies out of France to New York at the onset of World War Two, she immediately realized that she would be unable to republish it in the USA unless she took drastic steps to satifiy the censors. She cut out "Hans and Johanna" entirely, and she heavily edited the remaining two novellas, and she published the edited version with her own Gemor Press. Only a few copies of the original version exist today, and one of them was used to reproduce this ebook. It is an important document in Nin's literary canon, and the one that is most overlooked. Anais Nin (1903-1977) was born in Neuilly-Sur-Seine, near Paris, and was the daughter of a renowned pianist and composer, Joaquin Nin. Abandoned by her father in 1913, she and her family traveled to New York, where she began her now famous diary, comprised of some 35,000 pages over a period of six decades. When the first volume of 'The Diary of Anais Nin' was published in 1966, it began Nin's meteoric surge to fame. However, often overlooked are the works of fiction she created, beginning with 'The House of Incest' in 1936, which was followed by a then-banned edition of a collection of novellas under the title 'The Winter of Artifice.' This original edition has been republished for the first time in 2007. Perhaps Nin's most acclaimed fiction is the series of short stories in 'Under a Glass Bell,' which she self-published in New York during the 1940s when no commercial publisher would take the risk. She then began a series of novels that were interconnected and finally collected into one volume entitled 'Cities of the Interior.' Her final novel was 'Collages,' about which Henry Miller said, "Even the finest collages fall apart with time; these will not."Anais Nin was one of the 20th century's most innovative and compelling artist, and now her works are finally appearing in digital format.
