The Tropic of Cancer (1934)
As a member of “The Lost Generation,” Henry Miller was one of many expatriate writers and artists who found solace in Paris during the interwar years. Art and literature became autobiographical, describing the directionless feeling that writers and artists felt from their sobering experiences of surviving World War I. Literature explored the methods the writers used to find their way, such as drinking and engaging in open relationships. In his novel, The Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller draws on his own experiences, weaving a semi-autobiographical tale just as famous for its observations on 1930s expatriate life as it is for its graphic descriptions of his main character’s sexual encounters.
How much of The Tropic of Cancer is factual is up for debate; Miller uses his own experiences and his friends and colleagues as inspiration while some names, dates, and events are entirely fictional. Many of the characters that the protagonist encounters are written as caricatures, making the book a social criticism as much as it is an erotic novel. Using stream-of-consciousness, Miller floats back and forth from the past to the present, making his story seem more like the musings of an impoverished writer frustrated at his situation in this course of his life.
The sexual encounters of Miller’s protagonist were so explicit that it was banned and censored in multiple countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Finland. The United States Customs Service banned The Tropic of Cancer after its publication in France in 1934. In the early 1960s, when the American Publisher Grove Press published the novel, more than sixty plaintiffs in twenty-one states filed obscenity suits against retail booksellers. Since the United States Supreme Court ruled that The Tropic of Cancer did not have the characteristics of obscene literature in 1964, it has become one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century for what the New York Times considered the “free speech that we now take for granted in literature.”