MOLOCH

In this, his first extant novel, Henry Miller made his earliest full-fledged attempt at autobiographical fiction, a literary form he was later to perfect in Paris. Uncovered along with Crazy Cock in 1988 by Miller biographer Mary V. Dearborn, Moloch is based on Miller's years at Western Union and his first marriage. Set in the rapidly changing New York City of the early 1920s, the novel has as its hero the rough-and-tumble Dion Moloch, a man filled with anger and despair. Stuck in a demeaning job and an acrimonious homelife, Moloch escapes to the streets, only to be assaulted by a land that he despises - the transforming Brooklyn and its ever-increasing ethnic sights, sounds, and smells. Moloch strikes out at everything that he hates, battling against a world that threatens to overwhelm and then destroy him. Brutal and shocking, sometimes awkward and rambling, Moloch displays Miller's first steps toward the motif that he was to make his hallmark: the scathingly direct hero striving for an unflinchingly honest view of himself in a world created out of the writer's life.