Miller's groundbreaking first novel, banned in Britain for almost thirty years.
'I have a bottle between my legs and I'm shoving the corkscrew in. Mrs Wren has her mouth parted expectantly. The wine is splashing between my legs, the sun is splashing through the bay window, and inside my veins there is a bubble and a splash of a thousand crazy things that commence to gush out of me . . . With that bottle between my legs and the sun splashing through the window I experience once again the splendour of those miserable days when I first arrived in Paris . . . the feeling of suffocation, the fat cockroaches, the drinking and carousing . . .'
A penniless and as yet unpublished writer, Henry Miller arrived in Paris in 1930. Leaving behind a disintegrating marriage and an unhappy career in America, he threw himself into the low-life of Bohemian Paris with unwavering gusto. A fictional account of Miller's adventures amongst the prostitutes and pimps, the penniless painters and writers of Montparnasse, 'Tropic Of Cancer' is an extravagant and rhapsodic hymn to a world of unrivalled eroticism and freedom.
The novel's 1934 publication in France was hailed by Samuel Beckett as "a momentous event in the history of modern writing. 'Tropic Of Cancer' was subsequently banned in the UK and the USA and not released for publication for a further thirty years.
