Her journals also describe her marriages to Hugh Parker Guiler and Rupert Pole, in addition to her numerous affairs, including those with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and writer Henry Miller, both of whom profoundly influenced Nin and her writing.

In addition to her journals, Nin wrote several novels, critical studies, essays, short stories, and volumes of erotic literature.

[3] Her father's grandfather had fled France during the French Revolution, going first to Saint-Domingue, then New Orleans, and finally to Cuba, where he helped build the country's first railway.

Nin dropped out of high school in 1919 at age sixteen,[7] and according to her diaries, Volume One, 1931–1934, later began working as an artist's model.

After being in the United States for several years, Nin had forgotten how to speak Spanish, but retained her French and became fluent in English.

[8]On March 3, 1923, in Havana, Cuba, Nin married her first husband, American Hugh Parker Guiler (1898–1985), a banker and artist from Boston, later known as "Ian Hugo", when he became an experimental filmmaker in the late 1940s.

"[11] In late summer 1939, when residents from overseas were urged to leave France due to the approaching war, Nin left Paris and returned to New York City with her husband (Guiler was, according to his own wishes, edited out of the diaries published during Nin's lifetime; his role in her life is therefore difficult to evaluate).

Nin was acquainted, often intimately, with a number of prominent authors, artists, psychoanalysts, and other figures, and wrote of them often, especially Otto Rank.

Moreover, as a female author describing a primarily masculine group of celebrities, Nin's journals have acquired importance as a counterbalancing perspective.

[17] In the second volume of her unexpurgated journal, Incest, she wrote about her father candidly and graphically (207–15), detailing her incestuous adult sexual relationship with him.

[22] According to Volume One of her diaries, 1931–1934, published in 1966, Nin first came across erotica when she returned to Paris with her husband, mother and two brothers in her late teens.

They rented the apartment of an American man who was away for the summer, and Nin came across a number of French paperbacks: "One by one, I read these books, which were completely new to me.

"[23] Faced with a desperate need for money, Nin, Henry Miller and some of their friends began in the 1940s to write erotic and pornographic narratives for an anonymous "collector" for a dollar a page, somewhat as a joke.

In addition to her journals and collections of erotica, Nin wrote several novels, which were frequently associated by critics with the surrealist movement.

The diaries edited by her second husband, after her death, tell that her union with Miller was very passionate and physical, and that she believed that it was a pregnancy by him that she aborted in 1934.

[34] According to Deidre Bair: [Anaïs] would set up these elaborate façades in Los Angeles and in New York, but it became so complicated that she had to create something she called the lie box.

[40] Nin once worked at Lawrence R. Maxwell Books, located at 45 Christopher Street in New York City.

[42] Nin died of the cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, on January 14, 1977.

She was also elected to the United States National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1974, and in 1976 was presented with a Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year award.

[47] The Italian film La stanza delle parole (dubbed into English as The Room of Words) was released in 1989 based on the Henry and June diaries.

In February 2008, poet Steven Reigns organized Anaïs Nin at 105[48][49] at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, Los Angeles.

[50] Reigns said: "Nin bonded and formed very deep friendships with women and men decades younger than her.

"[51] Bebe Barron, an electronic music pioneer and longtime friend of Nin, made her last public appearance at this event.

[54] Cuban-American writer Daína Chaviano paid homage to Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller in her novel Gata encerrada (2001), where both characters are portrayed as disembodied spirits whose previous lives they shared with Melisa, the main character—and presumably Chaviano's alter ego—, a young Cuban obsessed with Anaïs Nin.

She explained that "[Nin's] Cuban Diary has very few pages and my delirium was always to write an apocryphal novel; literary conjecture about what might have happened".

[56] On September 27, 2013, screenwriter and author Kim Krizan published an article in The Huffington Post[57] revealing she had found a previously unpublished love letter written by Gore Vidal to Nin.