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Icons of America
Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer"
The untold story of Henry Miller’s explosive 1934 novel, banned in America for more than a quarter century
Though branded as pornography for its graphic language and explicit sexuality, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer is far more than a work that tested American censorship laws. In this riveting book, published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Tropic of Cancer's initial U.S. release, Frederick Turner investigates Miller’s unconventional novel, its tumultuous publishing history, and its unique place in American letters.
Written in the slums of a foreign city by a man who was an utter literary failure in his homeland, Tropic of Cancer was published in 1934 by a pornographer in Paris, but soon banned in the United States. Not until 1961, when Grove Press triumphed over the censors, did Miller’s book appear in American bookstores. Turner argues that Tropic of Cancer is “lawless, violent, colorful, misogynistic, anarchical, bigoted, and shaped by the same forces that shaped the nation.” Further, the novel draws on more than two centuries of New World history, folklore, and popular culture in ways never attempted before. How Henry Miller, outcast and renegade, came to understand what literary dynamite he had within him, how he learned to sound his “war whoop” over the roofs of the world, is the subject of Turner’s revelatory study.
Though branded as pornography for its graphic language and explicit sexuality, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer is far more than a work that tested American censorship laws. In this riveting book, published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Tropic of Cancer's initial U.S. release, Frederick Turner investigates Miller’s unconventional novel, its tumultuous publishing history, and its unique place in American letters.
Written in the slums of a foreign city by a man who was an utter literary failure in his homeland, Tropic of Cancer was published in 1934 by a pornographer in Paris, but soon banned in the United States. Not until 1961, when Grove Press triumphed over the censors, did Miller’s book appear in American bookstores. Turner argues that Tropic of Cancer is “lawless, violent, colorful, misogynistic, anarchical, bigoted, and shaped by the same forces that shaped the nation.” Further, the novel draws on more than two centuries of New World history, folklore, and popular culture in ways never attempted before. How Henry Miller, outcast and renegade, came to understand what literary dynamite he had within him, how he learned to sound his “war whoop” over the roofs of the world, is the subject of Turner’s revelatory study.
- GenresBiographyNonfiction
244 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2012
About the author
Frederick Turner
90 books9 followersFrederick Turner is the author or editor of a dozen books, including Into the Heart of Life: Henry Miller at One Hundred. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
August 3, 2022
“Tropic of Cancer...has risen from smuggled dirty book to American classic, a work that belongs on a select shelf of works that best tell us who we are, for better or worse.” (p. 6)
Some books stick in your brain. I read Tropic of Cancer when I was in college, for the usual furtive reasons young people read it, and found it strange and incomprehensible – lots of sex, but all of it joyless and mostly repellent. I read it again a few years ago, and started to understand what Henry Miller was getting at. In particular, I could see the nihilism in the way he tied the gross inhumanity of the First World War to a civilization trapped in a downward spiral of viciousness and decay. Tropic of Cancer was a kick in the head to the pieties of “decent” society, where the decency was all superficial, hiding things dark and terrible just under the surface.
Miller was 38 when he left for Paris in February 1930, and a failure at everything he had ever tried, from relationships to jobs to writing. He had worked at a bank, taught piano, been an editor at a mail-order catalog, ran a speakeasy, sold encyclopedias door to door, and worked as a hiring manager for Western Union. He wanted to write but was terrible at it; his attempts to imitate the styles of great nineteenth century authors were almost laughably bad, and certainly unpublishable. His only sustained ambition was to find a way to live comfortably without working. “Miller himself, though quite bright, remained forever in certain important respects a kind of Huck Finn character whose goal in life was to avoid growing up, to avoid as much as possible what the world called ‘work’ and ‘responsibility,’ so that he might live a life of anarchical freedom in some mental territory beyond the reaches of civilization.” (p. 68)
He arrived in France at a bad time, with $10 in his pocket just as the Great Depression was taking hold. The glittering Paris of the 20s, the Lost Generation of Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein was a fading memory, and Miller was on the fringes of what remained. He worked when he could find a job, although it was always illegally since he did not possess the necessary papers, and when he got money he spent much of it on prostitutes. He even created a scheme where he wrote letters to his acquaintances, asking them if they would each buy him one meal a week in exchange for his company. This actually worked, because he could be a captivating raconteur, endlessly spinning tall tales and making trenchant observations about people and society.
People had been telling him to stop trying to imitate other writers, and instead write the way he talked, and in doing so he finally found his voice. He hated what America had become, and which the rest of the world was becoming, as exemplified in the vacuousness of society in Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 book Babbitt. “The America Miller had come to know had forsaken its radical idealism, he believed, and had instead become enslaved to the sordid, soul-killing idea of Progress, Progress in every aspect of life, Progress at all costs.” (p. 80-81)
He was determined to channel his outrage and contempt into an assault on hypocrisy and complacency, and he wanted to hit hard. “Miller wasn’t after polish here – or thereafter for that matter. He was after words that when put together would hit the reader like a bullet or a bomb, or as he would say much later, like a ‘poisoned arrow.’” (p. 152-153)
Underneath everything else in the book, giving it its narrative structure, is the idea that society is built on lie, the lie that there is something better out there, and if we just work hard enough, we will one day find happiness.
We live the lie, we embrace it, we make it part of our innermost being, and it is a trap. As long as we are willing to put up with it in the hope that somehow, some day, things will get better, we will always be shoveling shit. “In some terrible way human beings over eons have collaborated in creating conditions of earthly existence that are truly execrable. From birth to death it is little more than a senseless scramble, sustained only by the hopeless hope that somewhere there will be a miraculous escape from it….And all of this, [Miller] says, is because of the human refusal to accept, or, better, to come to creative terms with, the inescapable conditions of earthly existence: birth, toil, suffering, aging, loss, death.” (p. 204)
Miller’s publisher saw an early draft of the book and realized its promise, but it was still an unpublishable, overlong mess. Anaïs Nin was by then Miller’s mistress and creative muse, and she deserves much of the credit for Tropic of Cancer’s
success. She saw it through three major re-writes, pushing Miller to clarify and condense, and in doing so added greatly to its impact and eventual success. It was published in 1934 and was an immediate sensation, and though banned in the United States until 1960, it was widely smuggled in and read, enhancing its reputation and Miller’s.
There was nothing like Tropic of Cancer when it was published. Other authors chaffed at the moralizing restrictions placed on them and their publishers, but none of them were willing to push the boundaries like Miller had. Hemingway wrote a collection of short stories called Winner Take Nothing, but the original profanity was neutered by the time it was published. F. Scott Fitzerald’s Tender is the Night touched on incest but when the book came out it had been edited to the point of incomprehensibility. Similar things happened to William Faulker’s Absolom, Absolom! and Thomas Wolfe’s Time and the River. In the end the authors all sacrificed the intensity of their stories for the realities of the publishing marketplace.
Tropic of Cancer is still a strange book, often gross, but compelling nonetheless. Miller could pull off an extended stream of conscious sequence like few other authors, and his ability to describe a scene using just the right words is amazing. When he talks about walking along the Seine on a winter’s afternoon, with the bare branches of the trees swaying in the wind, you can feel the chill in the air. All that being said, it is still the filthiest thing I have ever read, and I say that as someone who served on Navy ships, where profanity is considered an art form. Even so, I can’t get this book out of my head, which I suppose is a sign of its impact on me.
Some books stick in your brain. I read Tropic of Cancer when I was in college, for the usual furtive reasons young people read it, and found it strange and incomprehensible – lots of sex, but all of it joyless and mostly repellent. I read it again a few years ago, and started to understand what Henry Miller was getting at. In particular, I could see the nihilism in the way he tied the gross inhumanity of the First World War to a civilization trapped in a downward spiral of viciousness and decay. Tropic of Cancer was a kick in the head to the pieties of “decent” society, where the decency was all superficial, hiding things dark and terrible just under the surface.
Miller was 38 when he left for Paris in February 1930, and a failure at everything he had ever tried, from relationships to jobs to writing. He had worked at a bank, taught piano, been an editor at a mail-order catalog, ran a speakeasy, sold encyclopedias door to door, and worked as a hiring manager for Western Union. He wanted to write but was terrible at it; his attempts to imitate the styles of great nineteenth century authors were almost laughably bad, and certainly unpublishable. His only sustained ambition was to find a way to live comfortably without working. “Miller himself, though quite bright, remained forever in certain important respects a kind of Huck Finn character whose goal in life was to avoid growing up, to avoid as much as possible what the world called ‘work’ and ‘responsibility,’ so that he might live a life of anarchical freedom in some mental territory beyond the reaches of civilization.” (p. 68)
He arrived in France at a bad time, with $10 in his pocket just as the Great Depression was taking hold. The glittering Paris of the 20s, the Lost Generation of Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein was a fading memory, and Miller was on the fringes of what remained. He worked when he could find a job, although it was always illegally since he did not possess the necessary papers, and when he got money he spent much of it on prostitutes. He even created a scheme where he wrote letters to his acquaintances, asking them if they would each buy him one meal a week in exchange for his company. This actually worked, because he could be a captivating raconteur, endlessly spinning tall tales and making trenchant observations about people and society.
People had been telling him to stop trying to imitate other writers, and instead write the way he talked, and in doing so he finally found his voice. He hated what America had become, and which the rest of the world was becoming, as exemplified in the vacuousness of society in Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 book Babbitt. “The America Miller had come to know had forsaken its radical idealism, he believed, and had instead become enslaved to the sordid, soul-killing idea of Progress, Progress in every aspect of life, Progress at all costs.” (p. 80-81)
He was determined to channel his outrage and contempt into an assault on hypocrisy and complacency, and he wanted to hit hard. “Miller wasn’t after polish here – or thereafter for that matter. He was after words that when put together would hit the reader like a bullet or a bomb, or as he would say much later, like a ‘poisoned arrow.’” (p. 152-153)
Underneath everything else in the book, giving it its narrative structure, is the idea that society is built on lie, the lie that there is something better out there, and if we just work hard enough, we will one day find happiness.
‘For the man in the paddock,’ Miller’s narrator says ... ‘whose duty it is to sweep up manure, the supreme terror is the possibility of a world without horses. To tell him that it is disgusting to spend one’s life shoveling up hot turds is a piece of imbecility. A man can get to love shit if his livelihood depends on it, if his happiness is involved.’
Why is this awful irony so? Why is the man in the paddock with his rake and shovel and wheelbarrow willing to put up with so much shit? The answer Miller supplies in these pages is that they are willing because they believe that somewhere down the miserable road they call their lives there lies and exit, a way out, something or other that will redeem all their sufferings and make of life a glorious thing at last. (p. 202)
We live the lie, we embrace it, we make it part of our innermost being, and it is a trap. As long as we are willing to put up with it in the hope that somehow, some day, things will get better, we will always be shoveling shit. “In some terrible way human beings over eons have collaborated in creating conditions of earthly existence that are truly execrable. From birth to death it is little more than a senseless scramble, sustained only by the hopeless hope that somewhere there will be a miraculous escape from it….And all of this, [Miller] says, is because of the human refusal to accept, or, better, to come to creative terms with, the inescapable conditions of earthly existence: birth, toil, suffering, aging, loss, death.” (p. 204)
Miller’s publisher saw an early draft of the book and realized its promise, but it was still an unpublishable, overlong mess. Anaïs Nin was by then Miller’s mistress and creative muse, and she deserves much of the credit for Tropic of Cancer’s
success. She saw it through three major re-writes, pushing Miller to clarify and condense, and in doing so added greatly to its impact and eventual success. It was published in 1934 and was an immediate sensation, and though banned in the United States until 1960, it was widely smuggled in and read, enhancing its reputation and Miller’s.
There was nothing like Tropic of Cancer when it was published. Other authors chaffed at the moralizing restrictions placed on them and their publishers, but none of them were willing to push the boundaries like Miller had. Hemingway wrote a collection of short stories called Winner Take Nothing, but the original profanity was neutered by the time it was published. F. Scott Fitzerald’s Tender is the Night touched on incest but when the book came out it had been edited to the point of incomprehensibility. Similar things happened to William Faulker’s Absolom, Absolom! and Thomas Wolfe’s Time and the River. In the end the authors all sacrificed the intensity of their stories for the realities of the publishing marketplace.
Tropic of Cancer is still a strange book, often gross, but compelling nonetheless. Miller could pull off an extended stream of conscious sequence like few other authors, and his ability to describe a scene using just the right words is amazing. When he talks about walking along the Seine on a winter’s afternoon, with the bare branches of the trees swaying in the wind, you can feel the chill in the air. All that being said, it is still the filthiest thing I have ever read, and I say that as someone who served on Navy ships, where profanity is considered an art form. Even so, I can’t get this book out of my head, which I suppose is a sign of its impact on me.
September 16, 2013
This was a surprising read. I'd expected--and wanted--literary criticism. On its cover, in fact, the book is labeled literary studies. The bibliographical references and index list on the copyright page include criticism and interpretation of Miller, politics and literature, censorship, and history. What I found the book to be primarily was a capsule biography of Miller, and it's fascinating for that, as well as satisfying. Rather than a study of Tropic of Cancer, Turner's work concerns itself with how Miller came to write it, and in doing so he had to relate how all of the 43 years of his life prior to the novel's publication influenced it.
The most important fact about the early Miller was he was a failure. He'd failed at everything he'd ever tried to do. But he considered the most important failure to be his inability to write novels worthy of publication. He'd written several but he was told they were bad and he himself recognized them as second-rate. He was writing formally, conventionally. Finally, in Paris, out of the despair of poverty and that sense of failure at everything he'd tried to do and write, he decided to abandon all his previous styles and to write as he spoke and about what was on his mind. The result was Tropic of Cancer.
In breaking new fictional ground, he became what Turner chooses to call him, a renegade. Miller referred to himself as a "gangster author," much like the famous apaches of Parisian lore, the pimps, pickpockets and street fighters with whom he sometimes identified. Turner paints him in the tradition of frontiersman, those who were also renegades and braved new ventures in order to spread society and culture, in Miller's case literary experience. And like frontiersmen, Miller saw himself as a folkloric character and was, constantly talking, as busy at creating his own myth as "crank, huckster, outlaw and utopian dreamer" as any of them. In discovering that his gift was the ability to span the gulf between the spontaneity of talk and the meditative act of writing, the message was carried in what he wrote.
So Turner's story is how the legendary Henry Miller remade himself through a new style incorporating his natural knack as monologist and by using the great, equally legendary loves of his life, June Miller and Anais Nin, as muses and came to write Tropic of Cancer. As Turner explains it, he learned to live in the muck of reality and learned not only to love it but to articulate it in his own savagely erotic way. In doing so, Henry Miller finally became free.
The most important fact about the early Miller was he was a failure. He'd failed at everything he'd ever tried to do. But he considered the most important failure to be his inability to write novels worthy of publication. He'd written several but he was told they were bad and he himself recognized them as second-rate. He was writing formally, conventionally. Finally, in Paris, out of the despair of poverty and that sense of failure at everything he'd tried to do and write, he decided to abandon all his previous styles and to write as he spoke and about what was on his mind. The result was Tropic of Cancer.
In breaking new fictional ground, he became what Turner chooses to call him, a renegade. Miller referred to himself as a "gangster author," much like the famous apaches of Parisian lore, the pimps, pickpockets and street fighters with whom he sometimes identified. Turner paints him in the tradition of frontiersman, those who were also renegades and braved new ventures in order to spread society and culture, in Miller's case literary experience. And like frontiersmen, Miller saw himself as a folkloric character and was, constantly talking, as busy at creating his own myth as "crank, huckster, outlaw and utopian dreamer" as any of them. In discovering that his gift was the ability to span the gulf between the spontaneity of talk and the meditative act of writing, the message was carried in what he wrote.
So Turner's story is how the legendary Henry Miller remade himself through a new style incorporating his natural knack as monologist and by using the great, equally legendary loves of his life, June Miller and Anais Nin, as muses and came to write Tropic of Cancer. As Turner explains it, he learned to live in the muck of reality and learned not only to love it but to articulate it in his own savagely erotic way. In doing so, Henry Miller finally became free.
September 17, 2014
Turner, Frederick. Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of ‘Tropic of Cancer’,
Yale University Press, New Haven, 2012 (244pp.$24.95)
Franz Kafka’s maxim that a book should be an ax to the soul applies in spades to Henry Miller’s masterpiece, “Tropic of Cancer,” published fifty years ago in the United States
by Grove Press. Miller’s sexual adventurism, anti-Semitism and misogyny aside, this “great blob of spit in the eye” (as the author himself called it) marked the emergence from obscurity of a writer so intense, so brilliant and so outré, that he compares favorably with Marlowe and Shakespeare in his ability to sustain a monologue. Norman Mailer, another writer known for gangsterism in literature, pronounced himself taken aback by Miller’s artistic audacity “Tropic of Cancer” stands with “Huckleberry Finn” and “Absalom, Absalom” (with “A Farewell to Arms” close by) as the enduring classics of American literature.
It is hard to imagine that anyone could tell the story of Miller’s road to the Tropics any better than Frederick Turner in Yale University’s Icons of America series. “Renegade” is very much more than a re-telling of what is known of Miller’s life his wretched street life in Brooklyn at the turn of the century, his bohemian search to avoid bourgeois existence, and the sudden fateful meeting with his negative muse, the beautiful, alluring and mentally unstable June Mansfield (one last name among many she used) somewhere around 1922.
Turner’s writing stunningly fans the flames of Miller’s own path toward an art which transformed flagrant philandering, maudlin suffering, deep humiliation and loneliness into a career dominated by the single-minded pursuit of spiritual truth. In Turner’s skillful hands Miller’s story comes blazingly alive. Miller escapes his father’s tailor shop in Brooklyn to become a wandering autodidact with a satchel full of awful writing in pre-World War I America. He pimps for his wife, who finally sends him to Paris to be rid of his pestering, and complaints about art. Alone on the streets, almost penniless and without any French, Miller not only survives but creates a legend and publishes, supported by friend Anais Nin, with Obelisk Press in 1934, a book so unusual that it astounds not only Paris, but London and New York as well.
And exactly how would an American expatriate in depression-era Paris write a book that told the truth? Miller had already rejected so-called realism (Crane, Dreiser) and the European masers (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Mann). What was left?
Rising from his pre-artistic paralysis, Miller began to wander the Paris streets taking notes, writing letters bristling with arcana, autobiographical excursions, slabs hacked out of other books he’d come across, newspaper articles, observations about people, his needs, his raw yearning and aspirations. He talked endlessly, cadged drinks and suppers, and wandered among the Apaches, Parisian petty criminals and pickpockets. He rejected plot and, eventually, most of narrative itself. The book he wrote became Henry Miller. Famously, he found himself along and penniless, “the happiest man alive.”
“Tropic of Cancer” shocked many people when it was published. Government authorities in the United States fought to suppress it. It was, of course, language that gave the greatest offense, the raw obscenity of the thing itself which, along with its cruel, open-eyed humor, its rank bigotry, and its unvarnished hope, that throttled the unsuspecting reader. Miller writes, “One is ejected into the world like a dirty little mummy…all the roads are slippery with blood and no one knows why it should be so.” All of this because we refuse to come to terms with existence, birth, toil, suffering, aging, loss and death.
For Miller, these fundamental conditions cannot be changed. But what can be altered is our attitude toward life. The miracle for Miller is that some “men have created roses out of this dung heap” and that they “should want roses.”
Another miracle is this short book by Frederick Turner in the Yale Icons of America Series.
Yale University Press, New Haven, 2012 (244pp.$24.95)
Franz Kafka’s maxim that a book should be an ax to the soul applies in spades to Henry Miller’s masterpiece, “Tropic of Cancer,” published fifty years ago in the United States
by Grove Press. Miller’s sexual adventurism, anti-Semitism and misogyny aside, this “great blob of spit in the eye” (as the author himself called it) marked the emergence from obscurity of a writer so intense, so brilliant and so outré, that he compares favorably with Marlowe and Shakespeare in his ability to sustain a monologue. Norman Mailer, another writer known for gangsterism in literature, pronounced himself taken aback by Miller’s artistic audacity “Tropic of Cancer” stands with “Huckleberry Finn” and “Absalom, Absalom” (with “A Farewell to Arms” close by) as the enduring classics of American literature.
It is hard to imagine that anyone could tell the story of Miller’s road to the Tropics any better than Frederick Turner in Yale University’s Icons of America series. “Renegade” is very much more than a re-telling of what is known of Miller’s life his wretched street life in Brooklyn at the turn of the century, his bohemian search to avoid bourgeois existence, and the sudden fateful meeting with his negative muse, the beautiful, alluring and mentally unstable June Mansfield (one last name among many she used) somewhere around 1922.
Turner’s writing stunningly fans the flames of Miller’s own path toward an art which transformed flagrant philandering, maudlin suffering, deep humiliation and loneliness into a career dominated by the single-minded pursuit of spiritual truth. In Turner’s skillful hands Miller’s story comes blazingly alive. Miller escapes his father’s tailor shop in Brooklyn to become a wandering autodidact with a satchel full of awful writing in pre-World War I America. He pimps for his wife, who finally sends him to Paris to be rid of his pestering, and complaints about art. Alone on the streets, almost penniless and without any French, Miller not only survives but creates a legend and publishes, supported by friend Anais Nin, with Obelisk Press in 1934, a book so unusual that it astounds not only Paris, but London and New York as well.
And exactly how would an American expatriate in depression-era Paris write a book that told the truth? Miller had already rejected so-called realism (Crane, Dreiser) and the European masers (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Mann). What was left?
Rising from his pre-artistic paralysis, Miller began to wander the Paris streets taking notes, writing letters bristling with arcana, autobiographical excursions, slabs hacked out of other books he’d come across, newspaper articles, observations about people, his needs, his raw yearning and aspirations. He talked endlessly, cadged drinks and suppers, and wandered among the Apaches, Parisian petty criminals and pickpockets. He rejected plot and, eventually, most of narrative itself. The book he wrote became Henry Miller. Famously, he found himself along and penniless, “the happiest man alive.”
“Tropic of Cancer” shocked many people when it was published. Government authorities in the United States fought to suppress it. It was, of course, language that gave the greatest offense, the raw obscenity of the thing itself which, along with its cruel, open-eyed humor, its rank bigotry, and its unvarnished hope, that throttled the unsuspecting reader. Miller writes, “One is ejected into the world like a dirty little mummy…all the roads are slippery with blood and no one knows why it should be so.” All of this because we refuse to come to terms with existence, birth, toil, suffering, aging, loss and death.
For Miller, these fundamental conditions cannot be changed. But what can be altered is our attitude toward life. The miracle for Miller is that some “men have created roses out of this dung heap” and that they “should want roses.”
Another miracle is this short book by Frederick Turner in the Yale Icons of America Series.
August 11, 2014
A light read. One could get more from reading a bio of Miller or his Letters to Emil. But if you want to see an attempt to place Miller in a lineage that includes tales from the Wild West and those that sprang from the rough-and-tumble frontier mentality, then this may be your place, as that aspect, if it works, is not done much elsewhere. Too little time is spent on the discussions Miller and Nin had in 1933 as to what should stay or go in Tropic of Cancer.
November 2, 2016
As a lover of all things Henry Miller this book was a delight to chance upon and a pleasure to read. Most of the things I knew from reading Miller himself. The author of Renegade says as much himself that there's njot that much known about Millers past besides what he has divulged in his books. But what he adds really helps understand Topic of cancer better and Miller too. The long recapture of the seedier part of American history (I really should read Gore Vidal one day), helps to get to grips with the unique tone (and, incidentally, with understanding my own country) and vision of the book. It even got me some interesting insights in the current American election. A must for everyone who likes Tropic of cancer or any of the other books. Probably even a pleasure for non-Miller readers.
June 25, 2017
When he finally gets on to Henry, he writes about him with the genuine fondness of an admirer. It's a light bio with thoughts on 'Cancer' as a side. I enjoyed reading it but I love Miller.
August 12, 2018
Snippets of insight that help put perspective to the old perv's greatest work.
September 6, 2022
A well written thoughtful lookat one of my favorite books.
July 31, 2025
Although there was a bit too much preamble for my tastes, this book was well written, entertaining and informative.
November 27, 2013
This is an adequate book for someone new to Miller and Tropic of Cancer. The book is mainly a very general biography of Miller and the composition of TOC. If you've read a lot of Miller or any of the more detailed biographies of him, you don't really need this book. But if you're a newbie, it's a solid place to start.
As a long-time reader of Miller (I've read most of his books) and the transgressive literature of which his work was a part, I - perhaps unfairly - expected a more probing analysis of the book itself, especially in its relation to writers like Céline, Lawrence, Burroughs, Kerouac, Mailer, etc.
I also expected - again maybe unfairly - an analysis of the book's impact on the Beat Generation and the counterculture of the 1960s. I received nothing of the sort.
I also wasn't convinced that Turner had read all of Miller's books. He uses Mailer to dismiss The Rosy Crucifixion and doesn't write a word about the brilliant Big Sur and Colossus books.
The book did make me gain a new appreciation for Mark Twain, however - which is weird considering that it's about Miller. But the chapter on Twain as Miller's precursor is brilliant and gave a true appreciation for MT for the first time in my life. And I've taught and/or read Huckleberry Finn too many times to count!
As a long-time reader of Miller (I've read most of his books) and the transgressive literature of which his work was a part, I - perhaps unfairly - expected a more probing analysis of the book itself, especially in its relation to writers like Céline, Lawrence, Burroughs, Kerouac, Mailer, etc.
I also expected - again maybe unfairly - an analysis of the book's impact on the Beat Generation and the counterculture of the 1960s. I received nothing of the sort.
I also wasn't convinced that Turner had read all of Miller's books. He uses Mailer to dismiss The Rosy Crucifixion and doesn't write a word about the brilliant Big Sur and Colossus books.
The book did make me gain a new appreciation for Mark Twain, however - which is weird considering that it's about Miller. But the chapter on Twain as Miller's precursor is brilliant and gave a true appreciation for MT for the first time in my life. And I've taught and/or read Huckleberry Finn too many times to count!
September 11, 2013
Having read many of his books twice, and even his most obscure ones at least once, I'm pretty familiar with Henry Miller, as least as he presents himself in his work.
But this book added a nice combination of facts and insight to what Mr. Miller was trying to say.
At one point in my life I discarded all my Miller books in disgust for how he treated his young daughter.
I also fear that the walls he broke down continue to contribute to an across the board coarsening of our culture.
But, that said, no one captures the fierce energy of life like Henry when he's on a roll.
But this book added a nice combination of facts and insight to what Mr. Miller was trying to say.
At one point in my life I discarded all my Miller books in disgust for how he treated his young daughter.
I also fear that the walls he broke down continue to contribute to an across the board coarsening of our culture.
But, that said, no one captures the fierce energy of life like Henry when he's on a roll.
August 25, 2012
A fairly honest and favorable portrayal of Henry Miller. Turner spends a few chapters on reviewing American folk heroes and how Americans look at them as a basis for Miller's view of himself and how others see him. He sees the rebellious American spirit in Miller and it played into the forming of Miller's character and the characters in his books.
November 15, 2015
Much better than it needed to be, with beautifully written passages, very informative and insightful, even at times taking on the style and tone of the subject himself. I especially loved and was surprised at the depth of the section near the front, of the history of America and its tall-talk. I need to read the Cancers again.
March 8, 2013
Fascinating short book that pulls together strands of American literary, political, and cultural history alongside a succinct biography of Miller to explain his struggles and development into an iconic American writer in Paris.
December 4, 2012
And then read Orwell's "Inside the Whale" and E.P. Thompson's response "Outside the Whale".
Want to Read
September 16, 2013http://en.bookfi.org epub
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