Long hailed as a truly liberating book, daring and uncompromising, Tropic of Cancer is a cornerstone of modern literature that asks us to reconsider everything we know about art, freedom, and morality. When it was first published in the US in 1961, it led to more than 60 obscenity trials until a historic ruling by the Supreme Court defined it as a work of literature. Banned in the US and the UK for more than thirty years because it was considered pornographic, Tropic of Cancer continued to be distributed in France and smuggled into other countries.

Set in Paris in the 1930s, it features a starving American writer who lives a bohemian life among prostitutes, pimps, and artists. I mentally filed it away under “pretentious modernist experiment”.Shocking, banned and the subject of obscenity trials, Henry Miller's first novel Tropic of Cancer is one of the most scandalous and influential books of the twentieth century - new to Penguin Modern Classics with a cover by Tracey Emin The behaviours described were no more extreme than those that happened weekly in my hippy household. The surrealist stream-of-consciousness style, the impossible mixture of social commentary and autobiographical rantings, did not provide me with the tools I required from so-called pornography. Download Tropic of Cancer Chapter Summaries Share See Chapter Summaries Chart Timeline of Events 1928 Mona and Henry visit Paris Mona goes back to America, leaving Henry there. Thankfully, at that point I found it totally incoherent the page-long sentences unwinding like the ramblings of some drunken poet, wandering from meal to meal, drink to drink, from one sexual adventure to the next through the streets of Paris and Brooklyn. Tropic of Cancer Study Guide Henry Miller Study Guide Documents Q&As Discussions Download a PDF to print or study offline. One might worry that I would have been corrupted by the book. Given that my parents were liberal leftists and their bookshelf also included texts by Erica Jong, Aldous Huxley, Jean-Paul Sartre and Vance Packard, I realised that the hidden book had to be pretty radical. Copies had to be illegally smuggled into the US until the 1960s and a publisher did 10 years in jail. Their idea was, no doubt, one of caring parental censorship: they didn’t want the novel that led to the rewriting of US laws on pornography to fall into my 13-year-old hands. The only book in my parents’ bookcase which was turned the wrong way round with the spine hidden was Tropic of Cancer (1934) by Henry Miller.

Henry miller's tropic of cancer