Not an entirely true claim - French-Cuban writer Anaïs Nin was Miller’s lover at the time as well as a devoted believer in his extraordinary talent, and she helped him edit the book and get it published, all while supporting him financially. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions.” The book declares its aim of radical imperfectionism in its first pages: “I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. Though technically a novel, “Tropic of Cancer” blurs the lines between fiction and memoir, the protagonist being the author himself, the events of the book being largely inspired by and written in amid Miller’s bohemian years in Paris. With this spirit of defiance, Miller began work on the book that would become his first published work and his infamously banned masterpiece, “Tropic of Cancer.” First published in Paris in 1934, the book was too obscene to get printed in the United States for another 27 years, yet it was idolized by 20th-century literary giants such as George Orwell, Samuel Beckett and Norman Mailer as “one of the 10 or 20 great novels of our century.” First person, uncensored, formless - fuck everything!” At 39 years old, with nothing going for him, he wrote in a letter upon his arrival, “I start tomorrow on the Paris book.

In 1930, American Henry Miller moved unaccompanied from New York City to Paris, freshly separated from the second of what would be five wives and countless lovers throughout his life. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. 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.“I have no money, no resources, no hopes. 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. 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

Tropic of cancer novel