The Smile At The Foot Of The Ladder

Henry Miller

…it has shape, like a good poem: it has emotional density, delicacy of thought and beauty of language.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The Smile At The Foot Of The Ladder

Fiction by Henry Miller

Henry Miller has called The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder his “most singular story.” First published in 1959, this touching fable tells of Auguste, a famous clown who could make people laugh but who sought to impart to his audiences a lasting joy. Originally inspired by a series of circus and clown drawings by the cubist painter Fernand Léger, Miller eventually used his own decorations to accompany the text in their stead. “Undoubtedly,” he says in his explanatory epilogue, “it is the strangest story I have yet written…No, more even than all the stories which I based on fact and experience is this one the truth. My whole aim in writing has been to tell the truth, as I know it. Heretofore all my characters have been real, taken from life, my own life. Auguste is unique in that he came from the blue. But what is this blue which surrounds and envelopes us if not reality itself?… We have only to open our eyes and hearts, to become one with that which is.”

Buy The Smile At The Foot Of The Ladder

Paperback(published Apr, 01 1974)

ISBN
9780811205566
Price US
9.95
Price CN
13
Portrait of Henry Miller

Henry Miller

20th Century American writer

…it has shape, like a good poem: it has emotional density, delicacy of thought and beauty of language.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch