Tropic of Cancer

Tropic of Cancer is an autobiographical novel by the American writer Henry Miller. It was first published in Paris in 1934 by the Obelisk Press, and that edition was banned in the United States.

The narrator is a young American living in poverty in Paris, and the book is written in a stream of consciousness that follows him through the days. It is not organised around a story so much as around the person telling it.

Its candid treatment of sex is what it became known for, and the controversy that followed it is usually credited with changing what could be published. The Paris of the book is made of cheap rooms, borrowed meals and conversations that go nowhere. When Grove Press brought it out in the United States in 1961, the resulting obscenity trials tested the law.

In 1964 the Supreme Court of the United States declared the book not obscene, and it has been read since as one of the important works of twentieth-century writing in English. It is still read as a portrait of a particular city at a particular time.