No NK library is complete without his books.
In 1904, while living in Amsterdam, he wrote the novel Pijpelijntjes ("Lines from De Pijp"), which pretends to be a thinly veiled version of his own gay life with Aletrino in Amsterdam's "Pijp" working-class district. The homo-eroticism of the book, shocking to readers in the early 20th century, led to his dismissal from his teaching job and social-democratic political circles. Aletrino and Johanna van Maarseveen, de Haan's fiancée, bought almost the entire print run of the book, to keep a lid on the scandal.[3]
In 1907 he married van Maarseveen, a non-Jewish doctor, but this marriage is likely to have been platonic; they separated in 1919 but never officially divorced. A second novel, Pathologieën (1908, "Pathologies"), again contrary to the mores of its day, described the sorrows and joys of a sadomasochist relationship. However, this book went largely unnoticed, as did De Haan's prose sketches. He published five volumes of poems between 1914 and 1921 that brought him some acclaim.