Henry Miller Memorial Library

Henry Miller lived on Partington Ridge for eighteen years and wrote that Big Sur was the face of the earth as the Creator intended it to look. The library is not his house. It was his friend Emil White's.

And it is a bookshop, a garden and a concert stage now, which I expect he would have approved of. Stop in. It is free, and there is coffee.

Sit on the deck under the redwoods with a book from the shelves inside, Miller and Kerouac and Jeffers and everyone who has written this coast since, among the paintings and postcards and oddments Emil White left behind. The lawn out back is a stage: concerts, films and readings on summer nights, some of the best evenings on this coast, in a hall with no walls. It runs on donations, so buy a book.