Anaïs Nin

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) was a French-American writer, diarist and author of fiction and erotica who became a feminist icon of the twentieth century. She is famous for her seven-volume published diaries — journals kept for decades — and for her avant-garde novel of female desire Delta of Venus, alongside A Spy in the House of Love and the psychoanalytic novel House of Incest.

Born in France to a Cuban father, Nin moved to New York and later to Paris, where she knew Henry Miller, then back to California for decades. Her exploration of the inner life, of dreams, art and gender, kept her avant-garde, and her work was reclaimed by the feminist movement as a portrait of the artist as woman.