Journey to the End of the Night
The book that gave Miller his permission slip — he read it in manuscript and rewrote his own in its light.
Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller
Broke, shameless, and ecstatically alive in 1930s Paris — the banned book that ended American censorship.
- 1934
- 318
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeNo plot, no apologies: an American in Paris with no money and no prospects records his rounds of borrowed beds, cadged dinners, odd jobs, and sexual adventures, interrupted by passages of prose-poetry that lift off the page like weather. Published in Paris in 1934 and contraband in the English-speaking world until 1961, it is the book that put the unsayable into American literature — and the strangest thing about it is its joy.
Why we recommend it
The overture
'I am the happiest man alive. I have no money, no resources, no hopes…' — the first forty pages are the most galvanizing opening in autofiction, a genre this book effectively founded.
It moved the legal line for everyone
The 1961 Grove Press edition triggered sixty-plus obscenity prosecutions and a landmark Supreme Court ruling. Every frank book on every shelf since owes it a debt.
Hunger, written from inside
Nobody — not Orwell, not Hamsun — has written the arithmetic of the empty stomach with more comedy or precision. The famous dinner-schedule of friends is a masterpiece of abject bookkeeping.
What this book explores
- Hunger & poverty
- Desire
- The city
- The craft
The real history
The Obelisk Press, run by the piratical Jack Kahane, existed precisely to publish English books too hot for London and New York — its list is half the reason 'printed in Paris' once meant scandal.
Read the full story in the journalBring it to book club
- Miller declares war on literature in chapter one, in highly literary prose. Is the contradiction a flaw or the engine?
- How should a modern reader hold the book's treatment of women alongside its liberating influence? (This is the Miller argument; have it.)
- Why joy? Given the material — hunger, squalor, betrayal — where does the exuberance keep coming from?
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Black Spring
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The follow-up: same Paris, more dream, published two years later.
A Moveable Feast
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A Moveable Feast
Poverty in Paris as romance — the book Cancer exists to contradict.
Tropic of Capricorn
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Tropic of Capricorn
The prequel decade: how a Brooklyn personnel manager became this narrator.