Henry Miller came to Big Sur with no money and even less interest in behaving himself. He had already spent years writing books that were banned in America, smuggled into the country and sold under the table, and now he was living in the coastal hills with artists, poets, lovers, eccentrics and other people who had apparently misplaced their alarm clocks. The vast Pacific was there, the mountains were there, the fog came and went through the canyons, and for a while it was possible to imagine that a person might simply walk away from the machinery of modern life and disappear into the California landscape.
Naturally, the San Francisco Examiner could not let that happen. In 1947 the paper sent reporter Clint Mosher south with a mission: find the dirt on Miller and his bohemian companions. What followed was a four-day campaign portraying the Big Sur artists as a cult of anarchists, nihilists and general enemies of decent civilization. There was marijuana, surrealist poetry, barefoot girls, a dismembered mannequin, Central American jungle music and enough sinister laughter to frighten the average subscriber straight back into his chrome-and-bakelite toaster kitchen. Miller himself was less interested in the American Dream than in escaping it, and the Examiner seemed determined to make that escape look like the beginning of the end of Western Civilization.
But there was something wonderful underneath all the newspaper thunder. Miller believed the artist had a duty to go against the crowd, to choose the uncertain road, even poverty, rather than surrender the imagination to convention. Big Sur gave him a place to live that philosophy. The Examiner gave him a villain. And postwar America, busy building suburbs, appliances, conformity and a new industrial future, suddenly found itself staring at a bunch of strange people on a mountain who appeared to be having a pretty good time. This is the story of Henry Miller, Big Sur, and the newspaper crusade that tried to turn bohemia into a public menace.
