HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ANAIS NIN! Anaïs Nin was born in France on February 21, 1903. At the age of 11, she started writing a diary. She maintained it faithfully--and perhaps compulsively--until her death in Los Angeles on January 14, 1977. How many bloggers will journal for 60-plus years?

Nin was enough of dreamer to lose herself in her passions--and Nin was enough of a schemer to pursue and realize many of those passions. Long before the Web made it easy for the world to read anyone's writing, she dared to cobble together an unconventional literary career through self-publication and word-of-mouth. She was publicly criticized and even betrayed at various points, but she persevered, gradually garnering an appreciative audience.

She also supported and socialized with many of the most interesting and creative individuals of her time, including Henry Miller. Nin's liaison with Miller in the 1930s was a turning point in the development of her identity as an artistic and empowered woman. The relationship had a similar impact on him.

The reciprocity does not apply to their published output--at least not yet. Many of Miller's most substantial writings were banned in the United States for many years, but they eventually saw the light of day--largely due to the activist publishing of Barney Rosset. Nin was not that fortunate.

Nin's diary--widely considered to be her grand literary achievement--was first kept from the public eye out of respect for the privacy of the people mentioned in it. Then the diary was published in an adulterated form, edited with the same deference to privacy concerns. After that came "complementary" editions of the diaries, containing a number of the excised entries. Those scandalous and passion-driven passages (in such books as Henry and June and Incest) can make for electrifying reading, yet the diary has yet to be seen and evaluated as a whole entity by a substantial segment of the public.

Unless there is more access to the entirety of this magnum opus, it will be impossible to evaluate it fairly, to discover how much truth there is to Miller's pronouncement, in the essay "Un Etre Etoilique," that the diary was "a monumental confession which when given to the world will take its place beside the revelations of St. Augustine, Petronius, Abélard, Rousseau, Proust, and others."

Artist Judy Chicago has already paid Nin the high compliment of including her among the women named on the ceramic-tiled Heritage Floor of her landmark installation The Dinner Party (1974-1979), which has found a permanent home at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Chicago grouped Nin near Willa Cather and Doris Lessing by the place setting for Virginia Woolf.

Chicago is also the author of the powerful personal essay ">Anais Nin: Writer or Perfume?[sic].