Tropic of Cancer

First UK edition. 8vo. Pp. [vi], 318. Grey cloth lettered and blocked in gilt to spine, with errata slip to title page and pp. 259/288 transposed. Starburst dustwrapper design by Guy Nicholls, priced at 25s to front flap, with publisher's list and order form printed in blue on reverse. Originally published in Paris by Obelisk Press in 1934.

Some edge wear and tiny chips to head and tail of spine, now in protective wrapper.

A fictionalised memoir, which chronicles with unapologetic gusto the bawdy exploits of an American expatriate writer in Paris in the interwar years.

Routinely banned in English-speaking countries until its U.S. publication in 1961 by Grove Press led to a series of trials that culminated in the historic overturning of obscenity charges by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1964 (Grove Press v. Gerstein, 378 U.S. 577), thus enshrining the right to "free speech that we now take for granted in literature."

A major influence on the Beat Generation and the swinging 60s, one state Supreme Court Justice described it as "a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction." Lawrence Durrell, however, ranked it beside Moby Dick, stating that American literature begins and ends with what Miller has achieved.

American poet John Ciardi, meanwhile, called it "a substantial work of art," in which Miller's violent attack on orthodoxy, falseness, and all sham "cannot fail to be moral, because the ferocity is radically moral."

Included in Time Magazine's 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 and The Modern Library's list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, where it is ranked 50th.

Basis for the X-rated, 1970 Paramount Pictures film, directed by Joseph Strick from a screenplay written jointly with Betty Botley, with Miller himself acting as a "technical consultant" while also making a cameo appearance. It starred Rip Torn, James T. Callahan, David Bauer, Magali Noël, and an uncredited Ellen Burstyn as Mona Miller.

"At last an unprintable book that is fit to read." –Ezra Pound

[Shifreen & Jackson A9yy; S.E. Gontarski, Censorship and the Literacy Canon: The Rise and Fall of Grove Press, in CEA Critic, Fall 1992, Vol. 55, No. 1, pp. 47–58]