Publisher, Caedmon / Harper Audio (September 2008)

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Adult Fiction

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."

About the Author: Henry Valentine Miller was born in New York City in 1891 and raised in Brooklyn. He lived in Europe, particularly Paris, Berlin, the south of France, and Greece; in New York; and in Beverly Glen, Big Sur, and Pacific Palisades, California, where he died in 1980. He is also the author, among many other works, of Tropic of Capricorn, the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy (Sexus, Plexus, Nexus), and The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.

Many of his novels, including Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, were banned in the United states until almost 30 years after their initial publication in France. The United States publication of Tropic of Cancer in 1961 sparked uproar that led to a number of obscenity trials.

One of the early indications of how important Miller's career would prove to be came in 1940, when George Orwell wrote an essay entitled Inside the Whale, where he praised Miller with the following:

"Here in my opinion is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past. Even if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance; and after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses."