“Build your cities proud and high. Lay your sewers. Span your rivers. Work feverishly. Sleep dreamlessly. Sing madly, like the bulbul. Underneath, below the deepest foundations, there lives another race of men. They are dark, sombre, passionate. They muscle into the bowels of the earth. They wait with a patience which is terrifying. They are the scavengers. They emerge when everything topples into dust.”

American novelist, short story writer, and essayist

Henry Miller was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He became known for reshaping modern prose through semi-autobiographical fiction that mixed personal experience with social criticism, philosophical reflection, stream of consciousness, explicit language, surreal association, and mysticism. His best-known works in this mode include Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn, and the trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion, drawn from his years in New York City and Paris. These books were banned in the United States until 1961. He also wrote travel memoirs and literary criticism, and he painted watercolors.