Novel
Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller · 1934
Synopsis
An American approaching forty lives in Paris without a penny. The book opens at the Villa Borghese, where he lodges with Boris: he has no money, no resources, no hope, and calls himself the happiest man in the world. He borrows, gets himself invited to dinner, becomes for a time a proofreader on an American newspaper, frequents the cafés of Montparnasse and the brothels, and spends a winter teaching English at Dijon. Around him pass Carl, Van Norden, Fillmore, the Russian Macha, the Indian Nanantatee. The book has no plot, and is written as it is lived.
Context
The book appears in Paris in September 1934 from Jack Kahane's Obelisk Press, which published books banned in Great Britain and the United States, with a preface by Anaïs Nin, who paid for the printing with money borrowed from Otto Rank. Banned for twenty-seven years in the United States, it circulated there in copies smuggled in from France. When Grove Press published it in 1961, more than sixty prosecutions were brought against booksellers; the Supreme Court lifted the convictions in 1964, in the ruling Grove Press v. Gerstein.
Who it is for
A first-person narrative with no plot and explicit sexual passages. Translated into French by Paul Rivert in 1945, and reissued in Folio.
Prizes and reception
Selected in 2005 by Time magazine among the hundred best English-language novels; its American publication in 1961 was a bookshop success.
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