Tropic of Cancer

Henry Miller was born in Brooklyn, New York. In 1930, Miller went to live in Paris. For the next ten years he mingled with impoverished expatriates and bohemian Parisians; his first published book, Tropic of Cancer appeared in 1934 from the Obelisk Press in Paris. It was followed five years later by its sister volume Tropic of Capricorn. Sexually explicit, these books electrified the European literary avant-garde and were almost universally banned outside France. In 1961, after an epic legal battle, Tropic of Cancer was finally published in the States (and then in England in 1963). Miller became a household name, hailed by the Sixties counter-culture as a prophet of freedom and sexual revolution. He died on June 7 1980.