47 pages • 1 hour read
Henry MillerTropic of Cancer
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1934A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller was born in New York City in 1891 to German immigrant parents. When he was a child, the family moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn, where they lived when Miller graduated from high school. As a young man, he was active in the Socialist Party of America, and although he was passionate about learning, he only attended college for one semester. He was married to his first wife, Beatrice, from 1917 until 1923, and their daughter Barbara was born in 1919. He began working for Western Union in 1920 and would later document his experiences as an employee there in the novel Tropic of Capricorn. He began writing literary fiction in 1922, although the novel he started, Clipped Wings, was never published in full. In 1923, Miller met June Mansfield, who in 1924 became his second wife. He continued writing fiction, much of it—including the novel Crazy Cock—inspired by his relationship with June and her relationships with other women.
Miller visited Paris for the first time in 1928 and moved there alone in 1930, and soon after arriving, he began writing Tropic of Cancer—which he called “the Paris book” in letters to his friends. While in Paris, he met writer Anaïs Nin, with whom he would have a tumultuous relationship for the next fifteen years. In 1934, Nin financed the first printing of Tropic of Cancer by Obelisk Press; in the same year, June divorced Miller by proxy in Mexico City. During his time in Paris, Miller became acquainted with a number of other writers and artists, most notably members of the Dada and Surrealist movements who would influence much of his later work. He was also employed as a proofreader at the Paris office of the Chicago Tribune, an experience he documented in Tropic of Cancer.
Miller lived in France until 1939; he then visited Greece, which inspired his travelogue The Colossus of Maroussi, and finally moved back to New York in 1940. He lived briefly in Hollywood in 1942 and then moved to Big Sur, California, in 1944. During these years, he continued writing memoirs, essays, and literary fiction, much of which was banned in the United States. Miller settled in Pacific Palisades, California, in 1963, and married his fifth wife in 1967. He continued to write, publishing a chapbook about turning eighty in 1972, and became known for the dinner parties he hosted at which he met with promising literary and artistic figures. He cultivated friendships with a variety of actors and models and also became an accomplished watercolor painter. Miller died at his Pacific Palisades home in 1980 at the age of 88.
Sociocultural Context: Literary Censorship
Tropic of Cancer was written during a period when the legal definitions of “obscenity” and “pornography” were being dramatically reconsidered, along with questions of whether and to what degree “obscene” materials should be accessible to the public. Novels that are considered classics today, like James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), were banned at various times in America, Britain, Canada, Australia, and many European countries, and illegally imported copies of these texts were seized and sometimes even burned. Because of its explicit sexual content, Tropic of Cancer—along with many of Miller’s other works—joined the ranks of these novels.
Tropic of Cancer was published in France by Obelisk Press, an English-language publishing house run by Jack Kahane. Kahane was famous for his willingness to print books that were deemed “unprintable” because of their sexual content. Tropic of Cancer quickly became a bestseller in France, but it was immediately banned in the United States. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, some American booksellers attempted to smuggle copies of the novel into the country, but most were caught and some even served time in prison. The first American trial concerning Tropic of Cancer occurred in 1953, with the San Francisco ACLU losing a case in which they argued that the book should not be labeled obscene. Meanwhile, both Tropic of Cancer and its companion novel, Tropic of Capricorn (1939), had been translated into French-language editions that were deemed obscene and seized by the French government, and although the charges brought against the publishers were eventually dropped, Miller became an overnight celebrity in France as well as America.
Finally, after a series of legal actions that took place between 1957 and 1960, the American publishing house Grove Press won a historic victory and was allowed to legally print both Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and, in 1961, the first American edition of Tropic of Cancer. Booksellers across the country brought over 60 cases against Grove Press, but the literary landscape had been altered irrevocably. Texts once deemed “obscene” and thus without worth or benefit were now evaluated on the basis of the literary, artistic, political, or scientific merit they offered beyond their sexual content. In other words, Tropic of Cancer was soon considered a serious work of literature that happened to contain explicit sexual content. Miller’s own reaction to this shift, given that he loudly rejected all existing values systems—including systems for assessing literature—was famously ambivalent. After all, as he writes in Tropic of Cancer, his work is meant to be “a gob of spit in the face of Art” (2).
