Tropic of Capricorn

Tropic of Capricorn is a semi-autobiographical novel by the American writer Henry Miller, first published by Obelisk Press in Paris in 1939. It was a prequel of sorts to Tropic of Cancer, which had appeared in 1934.

The book was banned in the United States until a 1961 Justice Department ruling declared that its contents were not obscene, which is why American readers met it decades after it was written.

Miller drew on his own life throughout. During a three-week vacation from his job at Western Union in 1922 he wrote his first novel, Clipped Wings, a study of twelve Western Union messengers. It was never published and only fragments remain, though parts of it were recycled into later work, including the brief portraits of messengers that appear in this novel.

In the spring of 1927 he was living in Brooklyn Heights with his second wife, June Miller, and her lover, Jean Kronski, and one day he came home to a note telling him that the two of them had taken a boat to Paris. Later that year he stayed late at his office and typed a thirty-two-page document about their relationship, which became source material both for this book and for the trilogy he wrote afterwards.