Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" (Icons of America)
There is little to admire in the life of Henry Miller. He was a misogynist, an anti-Semite, a philanderer, a shameless self-aggrandizer, and a mooch who lived off his wife’s earnings from turning tricks. Beyond the fact that Tropic of Cancer made several of those Top 100 lists a few years ago, there isn’t much of his often brutish, scatological fiction that is held in even middling high regard today. But that’s not to say that he doesn’t fascinate. As a self-styled literary renegade, his personal history—his wild marriage to June, his relationship with Anais Nin, his bohemian lifestyle—attracts more sustained interest than his extensive oeuvre. But Tropic of Cancer was indeed groundbreaking, and as Turner demonstrates so well, the novel stirred such controversy when it was finally published in the U.S. in 1961, nearly 30 years after its appearance in France, that it helped pave the way for the liberation of American letters. Turner provides a great deal of background to show how deeply autobiographical the novel is in its gritty details and its in-your-face ethos. --Ron Antonucci