In 1961, when Grove Press legally published the book in the United States, over 60 obscenity lawsuits in over 21 states were brought against booksellers that sold it. The opinions of courts varied; for example, in his dissent from the majority holding that the book was not obscene, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Michael Musmanno wrote Cancer is “not a book. It is a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity.”
Publisher Barney Rosset hired lawyer Charles Rembar to help Rosset lead the “effort to assist every bookseller prosecuted, regardless of whether there was a legal obligation to do so.” Rembar successfully argued two appeals cases, in Massachusetts and New Jersey, although the book continued to be judged obscene in New York and other states.
In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Grove Press, Inc. v. Gerstein, cited Jacobellis v. Ohio (which was decided the same day) and overruled state court findings that Tropic of Cancer was obscene.
Other countries
The book was banned outside the U.S. as well:
In Canada, it was on the list of books banned by customs as of 1938. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police seized copies of the book from bookstores and public libraries in the early 1960s. By 1964, attitudes toward the book had “liberalized”.
Only smuggled copies of the book were available in the United Kingdom after its publication in 1934. Scotland Yard contemplated banning its publication in Britain in the 1960s, but decided against the ban because literary figures such as T. S. Eliot were ready to defend the book publicly.
In Australia the book was banned until the early 1970s when the Minister for Customs and Excise, Don Chipp, largely ended censorship of printed material in the country.
In Finland all printed copies of the Finnish versions of the book were confiscated by the state before the books were to be published in 1962. The book was not published there in Finnish until 1970, however the book was available in Swedish and English.
Critical reception
Individual reviewers
In 1935, H. L. Mencken read the 1934 Paris edition, and sent an encouraging note to Miller: “I read Tropic of Cancer a month ago. It seems to me to be a really excellent piece of work, and I so reported to the person who sent it to me. Of this, more when we meet.”
George Orwell reviewed Tropic of Cancer in the New English Weekly in 1935. Orwell focused on Miller’s descriptions of sexual encounters, which he deemed significant for their “attempt to get at real facts,” and which he saw as a departure from dominant trends. Orwell argued that, although Miller concerns himself with uglier aspects of life, he is nonetheless not quite a pessimist, and seems to find that the contemplation of ugliness makes life more worthwhile rather than less. Concluding, he described Tropic of Cancer as “a remarkable book” and recommended it to “anyone who can get hold of a copy.” Returning to the novel in the essay “Inside the Whale” (1940), George Orwell wrote the following:
I earnestly counsel anyone who has not done so to read at least Tropic of Cancer. With a little ingenuity, or by paying a little over the published price, you can get hold of it, and even if parts of it disgust you, it will stick in your memory. … 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….
Samuel Beckett hailed it as “a momentous event in the history of modern writing.” Norman Mailer, in his 1976 book on Miller entitled Genius and Lust, called it “one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century, a revolution in consciousness equal to The Sun Also Rises”.
Edmund Wilson said of the novel:
The tone of the book is undoubtedly low; The Tropic of Cancer, in fact, from the point of view both of its happenings and of the language in which they are conveyed, is the lowest book of any real literary merit that I ever remember to have read… there is a strange amenity of temper and style which bathes the whole composition even when it is disgusting or tiresome.
In 1980, Anatole Broyard described Tropic of Cancer as “Mr. Miller’s first and best novel,” showing “a flair for finding symbolism in unobtrusive places” and having “beautiful sentences.” Julian Symons wrote in 1993 that “the shock effect of the novel has gone,” although “it remains an extraordinary document.” A 2009 essay on the book by Ewan Morrison described it as a “life-saver” when he was “wandering from drink to drink and bed to bed, dangerously close to total collapse.”
Appearances in lists of best books
The book has been included in a number of lists of best books, such as the following:
In July 1998, the Board of the Modern Library ranked Tropic of Cancer 50th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
In July 1998, students of the Radcliffe Publishing Course, at the request of the Modern Library editorial board, compiled their own list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, and the book was ranked 84th.
Between July 1998 and October 1998, an online reader poll by the Modern Library placed the novel 68th among the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
In a survey of librarians published in November 1998, the book was ranked 132nd in a list of 150 fiction books from the 20th century.
Time magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.
The novel was listed in the 2006 book 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.
It was one of the “1000 Novels Everyone Must Read” in The Guardian in 2009.
It was included in the list “The 75 Books Every Man Should Read” (2011) in Esquire.
Influences
Influences on Miller
Critics and Miller himself have claimed that Miller was influenced by the following in writing the novel:
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, especially Journey to the End of the Night (1932), his semi-autobiographical first novel featuring a “comic, antiheroic character”. Nevertheless, George Orwell wrote “Both books use unprintable words, both are in some sense autobiographical, but that is all.”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, especially his Notes from Underground (1864).
James Joyce. Nevertheless, Orwell felt that the novel did not resemble Joyce’s Ulysses.
François Rabelais.
Henry David Thoreau.
Walt Whitman, who wrote in a similar style about common people. The poet is mentioned favorably in the novel several times, for example: “In Whitman the whole American scene comes to life, her past and her future, her birth and her death. Whatever there is of value in America Whitman has expressed, and there is nothing more to be said.”
Novel’s influence on other writers
Tropic of Cancer “has had a huge and indelible impact on both the American literary tradition and American society as a whole.” The novel influenced many writers, as exemplified by the following:
Lawrence Durrell’s 1938 novel The Black Book was described as “celebrat[ing] the Henry Miller of Tropic of Cancer as his Durrell’s literary father.”
It has been claimed that the novel impressed the Beat Generation writers in the 1960s such as Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs.
Erica Jong wrote “…when I was searching for the freedom to write the 1973 novel Fear of Flying, I picked up Tropic of Cancer and the sheer exuberance of the prose unlocked something in me.” In turn, Miller praised Fear of Flying in 1974, comparing it to Tropic of Cancer.
Adaptation
The novel was adapted for a 1970 film Tropic of Cancer directed by Joseph Strick, and starring Rip Torn, James T. Callahan, and Ellen Burstyn. Miller was a “technical consultant” during the production of the movie; although he had reservations about the adaptation of the book, he praised the final movie. The film was rated X in the United States, which was later changed to an NC-17 rating.
References or allusions in other works
Literature
In his 1948 autobiography, poet and writer Robert W. Service wrote a few comments about Tropic of Cancer, for example, “Of course the book shocked me but I could not deny a strange flicker of genius in its wildest fights.”
In chapter 2 of William Gaddis’s 1955 novel The Recognitions, set in Paris in the 1930s, an artist complains “I’ve got to show these pictures, I’ve got to sell some of them, but how can I have people coming up there with him there? He’s dying. I can’t put him out on the street, dying like that . . . even in Paris.” (63–64) which echoes the scene in Tropic of Cancer where the artist Kruger tries to get the sick Miller out of his studio so that he can exhibit his pictures. “People can’t look at pictures and statues with enthusiasm when a man is dying before their eyes.” (Grove ed., 195)
In his 1960 short story “Entropy,” Thomas Pynchon begins with a quote from this novel.
In the 1965 novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut, Lila reads the book “as though… it were Heidi.”
In the 1969 novel The Seven Minutes by Irving Wallace, the book and the trial are mentioned.
In the 1994 play Pterodactyls by Nicky Silver, the novel is mentioned by the character Emma: “She reads poems by Emily Bronté and I read chapters from The Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller.”
In Carl Hiaasen’s 1995 Stormy Weather a
