Tropic of Cancer Study Guide

Henry Miller was born in 1891 in Manhattan’s ethnically German Yorkville neighborhood. Miller’s parents were German Lutheran emigrants. While Miller was still young, his family moved to Brooklyn, where he primarily grew up. Miller married Beatrice Wickens in 1917, with whom he had one daughter before divorcing in 1923. During this period he lived in Brooklyn and worked at Western Union. He began writing, quitting his job in 1924 to focus on it. Around this time he also struck up a relationship with 21-year-old June Mansfield, whom he married and lived with for three years, until she left for Paris with her suspected lesbian lover, Jean Kronski. In 1930, Miller moved to Paris, where he lived for a decade. During this time, he worked at a newspaper, embraced the bohemian literary scene, and published his first books. From his 1934 debut with Tropic of Cancer onward, Miller consistently attracted massive controversy for the graphic sexual content of his works. He won praise and regard from the leading literary figures of the day, yet his books were for decades banned in his native United States (being labelled pornography) and had to be smuggled into the country. After a brief stint in Greece, Miller returned to the U.S. in the early 1940s, heading to California and eventually settling in Big Sur. There he lived for his last four decades, continuing to write and getting married and divorced several times. By the time of his death in 1980, his subversive literary output had left its mark on generations of readers and writers.

Tropic of Cancer takes place when and where it was written, in the Paris of the early 1930s. Miller’s novel is highly autobiographical, and most details in it can be mapped onto real events and people (he changes their names, but not his own). Henry’s youth in Brooklyn, his estranged wife, his job at a newspaper, and so on, are all taken directly from Miller’s own life. The bohemian American émigré scene evoked in the novel was likewise a real phenomenon. The vision of Paris the novel conveys—in which everyone is scrounging for the bare minimum to stay alive, and seemingly every woman is willing to have sex for a price—reflect the dire straits of the global economic depression of the early 1930s. Miller’s purportedly authentic account of this world struck American censors as too obscene to print: Tropic of Cancer was banned as pornography in the United States until the early 1960s. Ironically, the controversy around this banning served Miller well: he achieved cult status as an iconoclast, and his books continued to be smuggled into the U.S., where readers were shocked and delighted in equal measure. He came to be considered a pioneer for freedom of speech, vindicated in the eventual unbanning of his books, which served as a landmark legal precedent that changed what could be published in the U.S..

As an autobiographical account of Miller’s life as a writer and intellectual, Tropic of Cancer alludes, not surprisingly, to a broad range of literary predecessors. Given the iconoclastic nature of Miller’s project, many of Henry’s references to hallowed figures are derogatory (he dismisses Byron, Victor Hugo, and Joseph Conrad in passing in one paragraph). Among the authors who do receive Henry’s approval are the ancient Roman Petronius and the Renaissance Frenchman Rabelais, both authors of bawdy, picaresque prose works (the Satyricon and Gargantua and Pantagruel, respectively) that don’t quite have plots—much like Tropic of Cancer itself. Walt Whitman also earns Henry’s praise, as his uncensored poetic self-revelations resemble what Henry wants to write. Perhaps Henry’s most reverential namecheck goes to Dostoevsky’s novel about nihilistic revolutionaries, Demons; Henry finds in it a precursor to the radical implosion of societal values he seeks to effect in his own work. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche explored similar questions of morality with comparable intensity, and though Henry only mentions him in passing a handful of times, he clearly exerts a major influence on Miller’s radically iconoclastic worldview. The intensity of this worldview, as presented in Tropic of Cancer, deeply impacted Miller’s literary contemporaries. T.S. Eliot somewhat surprisingly praised the book, perhaps finding it an exemplary distillation of the cultural collapse and sexual chaos he explored in his poem The Waste Land. George Orwell strongly praised the book as well, seeing its uncensored directness as an antidote to the linguistic obfuscation that he associated with authoritarianism in novels like 1984. Miller’s influence on younger American writers was enormous, particularly with the “Beat” movement of the 1950s: Jack Kerouac’s novels and Allen Ginsberg’s poems embraced and employed Miller’s celebration of the seedy side of life, as well as his freeform literary approach.