The National Book Award-winning author of Samuel Beckett draws on unprecedented access to unpublished archives and journals to provide an incisive portrait of the controversial author, her literary work, and her complex personal life. She filled 69 volumes with her exploits, observations, and interpretations, labored painfully over her fiction, and finally, in the last decade of her unusual and flamboyant life, was granted the recognition she always craved. Although the diaries that made her reputation were heavily edited and reworked, her surviving husband, Rupert Pole, is currently releasing "unexpurgated" volumes, including the disquieting Incest: From a "Journal of Love" (1992). Bair is the first scholar to be granted access to Nin's original diaries and to have the full cooperation of Pole and Nin's family and friends. Accordingly, Bair takes pains to treat Nin with the objectivity and critical analysis a writer, even a "major minor" one like Nin, deserves. This sterling biography clears up confusion on several fronts and offers the best portrait not only of Nin but of her husband Hugo Guiler, the man who "paid" for Nin's extravagant and, in some ways, pioneering life. Donna Seaman The National Book Award-winning author of Samuel Beckett draws on unprecedented access to unpublished archives and journals to provide an incisive portrait of the controversial author, her literary work, and her complex personal life.