It is a story of the American Paris, but not along quite the usual lines, because the Americans who figure in it happen to be people without money. Miller himself insists that it is straight autobiography, but the tempo and method of telling the story are those of a novel. Tropic of Cancer is a novel in the first person, or autobiography in the form of a novel, whichever way you like to look at it. And in fact the subject matter of the book, and to a certain extent its mental atmosphere, belong to the twenties rather than to the thirties. Eliot, Herbert Read, Aldous Huxley, John dos Passos, Ezra Pound-on the whole, not the writers who are in fashion at this moment. When Henry Miller's novel, Tropic of Cancer, appeared in 1935, it was greeted with rather cautious praise, obviously conditioned in some cases by a fear of seeming to enjoy pornography.
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