A Systematic Review of American Literary Trends in Henry Miller Scholarship: 1935-Present

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Over the last year, I have been involved with several research projects that have directly and indirectly contributed to advancing this current research project on Henry Miller. Over the course of this last year, I have been focused on archive research and database mining to acquire hundreds of news articles evaluating the position of Miller’s literary work in the greater spectrum of modern American literature. These news articles will be organized and coded for specific themes using the data analysis software ATLAS.ti. This software program allows me to input the data and then, depending on the content of the material, code the content into a variety of fields. I gathered rare, printed materials from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Minnesota, and the University of California, Los Angeles. The data analysis is centered on the decade of the 1950s, a significant period before Miller’s work, because globally recognized. While at UCLA, I was able to examine data from hundreds of French news pieces on Miller, some of which revealed how quickly Miller was being compared with the great 20th Century French authors. In an effort to more quickly demonstrate the shifts in public opinions and literary status of Miller, I have been focusing on gathering data from the 1950s and the 1960s, as these two decades--I will demonstrate--represent the greatest shifts in Miller’s public image, both in Japan and the United States, and to a lesser extent in Europe, where Miller was relatively established and respected at an earlier period.