Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

Paperback

352 pages

Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller’s masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in modern literature, permitted the publication of this first volume of Miller’s famed mixture of memoir and fiction, which chronicles with unapologetic gusto the bawdy adventures of a young expatriate writer, his friends, and the characters they meet in Paris in the 1930s. Tropic of Cancer is now considered, as Norman Mailer said, “one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century.”

Henry Miller was born in New York City on December 26, 1891. Miller briefly attended City College of New York, but abandoned his university studies after only two months. In 1930 Miller traveled to Paris, where he stayed until 1940. During this period he was financed by his lover and fellow writer, Anaïs Nin, who helped him obtain a first printing of the celebrated and controversial Tropic of Cancer (1934); the book was banned in the United States at the time Grove Press printed it in 1961, which promptly initiated a costly, but successful, Supreme Court case to overrule the ban.