It is based on his experience as a Parisian expatriate in the early 1930s, when he and Alfred Perlès shared a small apartment in suburban Clichy as struggling writers (at 4 Avenue Anatole-France).

Chiefly, Joey with Nys, a prostitute he meets at the Café Wepler near Montmartre, and Carl with Colette, a fifteen-year-old runaway who moves in with them before eventually being retrieved by her parents.

The second half, “Mara-Marignon,” describes Carl's volatile love affair with the married Eliane, and Joey's relationship with Mara, a prostitute he meets on the Champs-Élysées.

The thin volume was initially written in New York shortly after Miller's return from Paris in 1940,[1] and revised in Big Sur in 1956, while he was working on Nexus.

[6] Following Miller's victory in the obscenity trial for Tropic of Cancer, Quiet Days in Clichy was finally published in the United States by Grove Press in 1965.