Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch by Henry Miller is the portrait of a place-one of the most colorful in the United States-and of the extraordinary people Miller knew there: writers (and writers who did not write), mystics seeking truth in meditation (and the not-so-saintly looking for sex-cults or celebrity), sophisticated children and adult innocents; geniuses, cranks and the unclassifiable. Henry Miller wrote with a buoyancy and brimming energy that are infectious. But this is also a serious book-the testament of a free spirit who broke through the restraints and cliches of modern life to find within himself his own kind of paradise. Paperback, 176 pages, published in 1957. Henry Miller was an American writer and painter infamous for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of "novel" that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, and mysticism, one that is always about the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional. His books were banned in the United States for their lewd content until 1964 when a court ruling overturned this order, acknowledging Miller's work as literature in what became of the most celebrated victories of the sexual revolution.