Henry Miller
![Tropic of Cancer Henry Miller]( "Tropic of Cancer Henry Miller")
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By: Ballantine Books
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 161
Average rating: 4.0 of 5
Puerile, vulgar, and tawdry. 5 out of 5 stars.
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Puerile, vulgar, and tawdry.
Apt description of Henry Miller, American expatriate and author of "Tropic of Cancer," a semi-autobiographical novel of his time in Paris, pathetic in its hedonism, rich in its misanthropy, and ultimately anarchic. Miller makes no attempts to portray his novel as a redeeming salvo; he revels in his own literary filth amid his self-described truth and ugliness. And for this, the novel was banned in the United States after it was published in the 1930s. Banned, for its obscenity.
Banned, for its vulgarity. Banned, for its depravity.
But is "Tropic of Cancer" an exercise in literary putrefaction? Is Henry Miller a purveyor of repulsiveness?
Upon my first reading at the age of eighteen, "Tropic of Cancer" spoke to me of the truth inherent in human nature, all of the maliciousness, greed, hate, and grotesqueness that humans face every day and attempt to rectify in the name of the common good. And the novel did not hide these facets of human nature. Rather, Miller brought them to the forefront and wallowed in them, I felt, to reveal these truths to a public that refused to acknowledge their existence. Even when its existence was present every day. The novel read like an unspoken truth, and I clung to every word seeking that truth for myself.
But I did not need to search for it.
Miller made this truth accessible for all.
And had I found it? What would I have done with that knowledge? Would I lose my humanity like Miller had done?
"Tropic of Cancer" is as close to depravity's surface as I will ever get.
Or allow myself to.
Editorial Review:
Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller's masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1943. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in modern literature, permitted the publication of this first volume of Miller's famed mixture of memoir and fiction, which chronicles with unapologetic gusto, the bawdy adventures of a young expatriate writer, his friends, and the characters they meet in Paris in the 1930s. Tropic of Cancer is now considered, as Norman Mailer said, "one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century."
