Henry Miller's first book, Tropic of Cancer, was pub lished in Paris in 1934 and was immediately banned in all English-speaking countries. With its sequel, Tropic of Capricorn (1939), which actually covers an earlier period in Miller's life, it makes up a running fictional autobiography remarkable for its candour, gusto, and completeness. The two books have in common a plain-spoken truthfulness, a good-hearted comedy, and a quality of joy discovered somewhere on the far side of despair, things that their author was seldom to match and never to surpass in later self-unravellings.

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‘A rhapsody deriving from Whitman, Joyce, Lawrence and Celine, Tropic of Cancer is a ranting, randy book carried along by a deep, sensual enjoyment of living." Sunday Times

A penniless and as yet unpublished writer, Henry Miller arrived in Paris in 1930. Leaving behind a disintegrating marriage and an unhappy career in America, he threw himself into the low-life of Bohemian Paris with unwavering gusto. A fictional account of Miller"s adventures amongst the prostitutes and pimps, the penniless painters and writers of Montparnasse, Tropic of Cancer is an extravagant and rhapsodic hymn to a world of unrivalled eroticism and freedom.

Tropic of Cancer"s 1934 publication in France was hailed by Samuel Beckett as "a momentous event in the history of modern writing". The novel was subsequently banned in the UK and the USA and not released for publication for a further thirty years.

‘Tropic of Cancer is a great prophetic book, a warning of what deadens life, an affirmation that it can yet be lived, though with extreme difficulty, in an age whose sterile non-cultures seek to thwart all mainsprings of fertility. Miller reveals himself as a battered faun, a crafty innocent, a lonely, lazy, sometimes fearful, always steadfast, worshipper of life." Colin Maclnnes, Spectator