Tropic of Cancer

What Tropic of Cancer is about

Tropic of Cancer is a loosely autobiographical novel about Henry Miller's life as a penniless American writer in Paris in the early 1930s. There is little plot. The narrator, also called Henry, cadges meals and beds from friends, works briefly as a newspaper proofreader and as an English teacher in Dijon, wanders the streets, and records his encounters with prostitutes, artists and other expatriates in frank sexual detail. Between the episodes come long, wild passages of rhapsody and rant about art, the modern world and his determination to write a book that is "a prolonged insult". The style, mixing obscenity, comedy, despair and joy, was unlike anything published in English at the time.

The ban, in full

The novel was published in Paris in 1934 by Jack Kahane's Obelisk Press, which specialised in English-language books that could not be published in Britain or America; the writer Anaïs Nin helped pay for the printing. US Customs banned it as obscene, and for nearly thirty years Americans could only get it as smuggled copies. Writers still read and argued about it; George Orwell's 1940 essay "Inside the Whale" is largely about Miller.

In 1961, after the courts had cleared Lady Chatterley's Lover, Barney Rosset's Grove Press published Tropic of Cancer in the United States. It sold more than a million copies in its first year, and also faced around sixty obscenity prosecutions against booksellers in over twenty states. Courts reached opposite verdicts in different states. In June 1964, in Grove Press v. Gerstein, the US Supreme Court ruled that the book was not obscene, effectively ending literary censorship of fiction for adults in the United States.

The book was also banned in Britain until the 1960s and in other countries.

About Henry Miller

Henry Miller (1891–1980) grew up in Brooklyn and worked at many jobs, including as an employment manager for Western Union, before leaving for Paris in 1930 to become a writer. He returned to the United States in 1940 and settled at Big Sur, California. His other books include Tropic of Capricorn (1939), which was also banned, and the trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion. He was also a painter.

Which edition to read

Grove Press and Penguin Modern Classics publish the standard text. Many editions include Anaïs Nin's original preface and Karl Shapiro's introduction from the Grove edition.

Reception and legacy

Tropic of Cancer influenced the Beat writers and later American fiction. It remains controversial: feminist critics, notably Kate Millett in Sexual Politics (1970), attacked its treatment of women.

Questions

Why was Tropic of Cancer banned?

For obscenity: its explicit descriptions of sex and its language.

When was the ban lifted in the US?

Grove Press published it in 1961, and the Supreme Court ruled it not obscene in 1964. More: books banned in the United States, books seized by customs.