Tropic of Cancer

Tropic of Cancer is Henry Miller's autobiographical first novel, published in Paris in 1934. Told in the first person, it recounts the days of a young American and a circle of writer and artist friends in Paris: they drift between cheap hotels, sidewalk cafés and odd jobs, now discussing literature and art, now arguing about the meaning of existence, continuing to write and think amid hunger, poverty and chaos. With long, rambling sentences, exaggerated and distorted details and biting self-mockery, Miller captures the squalor and absurdity of expatriate life in Paris in all its vividness. His direct, explicit treatment of work, conversation, drinking and sexuality kept the book banned in Britain and America for decades; it was not published in the United States until 1961, and in 1964 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned its obscenity ruling. The work is at once a personal memoir and an interrogation of an era: how does an impoverished artist preserve his inner world in a disorderly, materialistic world? The first of Miller's autobiographical trilogy, it forms, together with Black Spring and Tropic of Capricorn, his most representative writing and is regarded as a major source of postwar European and American countercultural literature. This Chinese edition is translated by Yuan Honggeng and published by Yilin Press, and includes a preface by Feng Tang and a translator's afterword.