Tropic of Cancer (1970) 27 February 1970 (USA)
Henry Valentine Miller (
December 26, 1891 -- June 7,
1980) was an
American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life
Henry Miller and yet is also fictional.His most characteristic works of this kind are
Tropic of Cancer,
Tropic of Capricorn and
Black Spring. He also wrote travel memoirs and essays of literary criticism and analysis.
Although
Miller had little or no money the first year in
Paris, things began to change with the meeting of
Anais Nin who would go on to pay his entire way through the
1930s including the rent for the beautiful and modern apartment at 18, villa
Seurat.
Anaïs Nin became his lover and financed the first printing of Tropic of Cancer in 1934 with money from
Otto Rank.
His works contain detailed accounts of sexual experiences, and his books did much to free the discussion of sexual subjects in
American writing from both legal and social restrictions. He continued to write novels that were banned in the
United States on the grounds of obscenity. Along with Tropic of Cancer, his Black Spring (1936) and Tropic of Capricorn (
1939) were smuggled into his native country, building Miller an underground reputation. One of the first acknowledgments of Henry Miller as a major modern writer was by
George Orwell in his
1940 essay
Inside the Whale, where he wrote:
" Here in my opinion is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the
English-speaking races for some years past. Even if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance; and after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere
Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of
Whitman among the corpses. "
In 1940, he returned to the United States, settling in
Big Sur, California, and continued to produce vividly written works that challenged contemporary American cultural values and moral attitudes. He spent the last years of his life at his home in
444 Ocampo Drive,
Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California.
The publication of
Miller's Tropic of Cancer in the United States in
1961 led to a series of obscenity trials that tested American laws on pornography.
The U.S. Supreme Court, in
Grove Press,
Inc., v. Gerstein, citing
Jacobellis v. Ohio (which was decided the same day in 1964), overruled the state court findings of obscenity and declared the book a work of literature; it was one of the notable events in what has come to be known as the sexual revolution.
Elmer Gertz, the lawyer who successfully argued the initial case for the novel's publication in
Illinois, became a lifelong friend of Miller's.
Volumes of their correspondence have been published.
In addition to his literary abilities, Miller was a painter and wrote books about his work in that field. He was a close friend of the
French painter
Grégoire Michonze. He was also an amateur pianist.
Miller died in
Pacific Palisades in 1980. After his death, he was cremated and his ashes scattered off
Big Sur.
Miller's papers were donated to the
UCLA Young Research Library Department of
Special Collections.
The Henry Miller
Art Museum at
Coast Gallery in Big Sur, the
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the
University of Texas at Austin, and UCLA all hold a selection of Miller's watercolors, as did The Henry Miller
Museum of Art in
Omachi City in
Nagano, Japan, before closing in
2003.
Moloch or, This Gentile
World, written in
1927, not published until
1992 (by the
Estate of Henry Miller).
ISBN 0-8021-3372-X
Crazy Cock, written 1928--1930, not published until 1960. ISBN 0-8021-1412-1
Tropic of Cancer, Paris:
Obelisk Press, 1934.
What Are You
Going to Do about Alf?, Paris: Printed at author's expense, 1935.
Aller Retour New York, Paris: Obelisk Press, 1935.
Black Spring, Paris: Obelisk Press, 1936. ISBN 0-8021-3182-4
Max and the
White Phagocytes, Paris: Obelisk Press,
1938.
Feminist activist
Kate Millett has criticized Miller for his depiction of female characters. In her
1970 work
Sexual Politics,analyzed Miller alongside
D.H. Lawrence and
Norman Mailer, finding that each tends to assume a male audience, objectifying female characters in the process. According to
Martin B. Duberman, writing for
The New Republic on
November 27,
1976, Miller ought to be rescued from both Mailer and Millett
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