"We came together in a dance of death and so quickly was I sucked down into the vortex that when I came to the surface again I could not recognize the world."

DESCRIPTION

Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller's masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in modern literature, permitted the publication of this first volume of Miller's famed mixture of memoir and fiction, which chronicles with unapologetic gusto the bawdy adventures of a young expatriate writer, his friends, and the characters they meet in Paris in the 1930s. Tropic of Cancer is now considered, as Norman Mailer said, 'one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century.

“There is an eager vitality and exuberance to the writing which is exhilarating; a rush of spirit into the world as though all the sparkling wines have been uncorked at once; we watchfully hear the language skip, whoop and wheel across Miller’s page.” —William H. Gass, The New York Times Book Review

FACTS

• Published in France in 1934 but banned in the USA until 1961

• “notorious for its candid sexuality”

• Famous court ruling which changed censorship standards to allow freedom of speech for modern literature

• Now considered an American classic

• Part of a trilogy along with Black Spring (1936) & Tropic of Capricorn (1939)