Tropic of Cancer

Miller hit Paris in 1930 with no money and no prospects, and turned the situation into a method: sleeping on floors, cadging dinners on a rotating schedule, and writing down everything with the varnish off. The book that resulted — begun in 1931-32 at the bottom, finished at the Villa Seurat — announces in its opening pages that it is 'not a book' but 'a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art,' and at the same time a celebration of being alive in a city that owed him nothing.

No American or British publisher could legally touch it. Jack Kahane's Obelisk Press — Paris's specialist in books the Anglo-Saxon censors banned — published it in 1934, with Anaïs Nin writing the preface and finding the printing money. For nearly three decades it lived as contraband, smuggled through customs in coat pockets, its reputation growing precisely because owning it was a crime.

Grove Press finally published it in America in 1961 and bought itself dozens of local obscenity prosecutions, until the Supreme Court settled the matter in 1964. By then the book had done its work underground: the Beats had built on it, a generation of writers had learned from its first-person shamelessness, and the trials it provoked helped end literary censorship in America.

A year, more or less, at the absolute bottom of Paris — narrated by a broke American writer named Henry Miller, who has lost his money, his wife Mona (gone back to New York), and every prospect, and who has decided that this destitution is the happiest condition of his life. The book drifts as he drifts: flophouse to borrowed floor, a dinner-cadging rotation among acquaintances, a stint proofreading stock tables on the night shift of a newspaper, a miserable teaching post in Dijon, and always back to the streets, the Seine, and the sentence.

Around him orbits a gallery of expatriate wrecks rendered without mercy or malice — the neurotic Boris, the woman-obsessed Van Norden, the respectable Fillmore coming spectacularly unrespectable — and through it runs the book's real business: rants, hymns, and meditations that break every rule of the well-made novel on purpose. It is a book about hunger that reads like appetite; the plot is survival, and the victory — the only one on offer — is the voice itself, which changed American writing as thoroughly as anything Hemingway did.