Tropic of Cancer       

The genius behind it all.  First published in the US in 1961 by Grove Press, Miller wrote this autobiographical novel while living in Paris 1931-1932.   It was published in France in 1934 but was deemed to be pornography here and it's long delayed publication was a pivotal shot across the bow of the literary censors who had controlled what could or could not be said.  Lawsuits were filed against those who sold it, which led to a series of trials on obscenity.   In 1964 the US Supreme Court overruled the decisions of state courts on the grounds that the book was a work of literature.  The success of this effort ushered in a new era of artistic freedom of expression and the beginning of the sexual revolution.  No small accomplishment as those who controlled the media were a pretty rough bunch in those days.  A pirated edition of the novel had been published in 1940 in Mexico and brought to New York by a fellow named Roy Brussel.  He went to jail for ten years.

The novel has little plot, it's just an extremely graphic diary of Miller's experiences hanging out and down and out in Paris.  His journal states, "Met Anais Nin, the writer, in Louveciennes.  Began writing Tropic of Cancer while walking the streets and sleeping where possible."  What makes it an incredible book is the exuberance with which he rejects all the morals and values of bourgeois society.  Unedited, unpolished and very funny, he lays everything out there.  He called it a "big, public garbage can.  Only the mangy cats are missing.  But I'll get them in yet."

Here are a couple of US newspaper reviews written in 1961, one bad, one good:

Mr. Henry Miller's autobiographical record of sex and hunger in the mouldy bohemias of Paris in the 1930s has been printed in this country for the first time....I must confess that after more than a quarter of a century, I find it as 'dated' and as anachronistic as Jurgen, or a novel by Ouida....One of the defects of censorship, I suppose, is that it tends to put criticism on the defensive. A book must be praised if it isn't to be damned. In the process, the work in question, instead of being soberly judged, achieves a spurious ambiguity....This is a hobo novel, a hobo life of the open boulevards, almost a piece of 'proletarian' fiction, in which sex has been substituted for Marxism and 'naughty' words for revolutionary clichés....It is an old and obsolete book and, if it had been allowed its little day in the thirties, it would by now probably be as dead as most of the other shallow works of that sad era of doubt and confusion, of starvation and spiritual bankruptcy."
New York Herald Tribune (1924-1966) - Leon Edel (06/25/1961)

"[This] was Henry Miller's first published volume, and it is as good as anything he has turned out since. It glows with the joy of discovery: I can write! ...To many readers 'Tropic of Cancer', strong language and all, may seem dated. But perhaps to many others the publication of the book here and now will re-emphasize its enduring freshness....Miller projects with gusto some of the great comic scenes of modern literature..... If literary quality is a criterion, these passages run far ahead of any considerations of obscenity; in themselves they guarantee that Henry Miller is an authentic, a significant author whose ripest work has been too long forbidden in his homeland."
New York Times Book Review - H.T. Moore (06/18/1961)
 

Miller, always the intellectual pioneer, also invented the west coast bohemian life style in Big Sur California in the 1940's.  His autobiographical Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch was published in 1957.  The ideas he presents here about alternative lifestyles removed from the mainstream of society were central to the philosophy of the sixties.

Miller returned to the US in 1939 and moved to Big Sur in 1944, where he remained until 1960 when, with the constant visitors and imposing house guests, it became too much for Miller and he retired  to Pacific Palisades in Southern California.  His presence at Big Sur began to establish the area as an artists colony .  At this time Miller wasn't as famous as he would be after the publication of Tropic of Cancer in 1961, but  many people still came out to visit the "underground" writer whose work had been banned in the United States.  He presents Big Sur as a paradise where  people are, "leading their own lives-on the fringe of society" having seen that, "the American way of life is an illusory kind of existence, that the price demanded for the security and abundance it pretends to offer is too great".  While living in Big Sur, Miller married twice and had two children.  Miller lived on Partington Ridge, also referred to as Anderson's Point.  The house was on a plateau two thousand feet above the Pacific Ocean. "About fifty feet from the house, the land simply ended, and it was an abrupt descent to the sea far below."

The improvisational spirit of Jazz music inspired Miller's no-holds-barred writing style.  He wrote, "I am not following a strict chronological sequence but have chosen to adopt a circular or spiral form of time development which enables me to expand freely in any direction at any given moment. The ordinary chronological development seems to me wooden and artificial, a synthetic reconstruction of the facts of life. The facts and events of life are, for me, only the starting points on the way towards the discovery of truth. I am trying to get at the inner pattern of events." 

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