Henry Miller was born in Brooklyn, New York. He had a variety of jobs as a young man, including several years working for the Western Union Telegraph Company. During this time, encouraged by June Mansfield Smith, the second of his five wives, Miller began to write. Aside from articles, stories for pulp magazines and prose poems, Miller worked on his first novels Crazy Cock and Moloch, and on the copious notes which would eventually transmute into the notorious Tropics books.