Paperback review: Renegade - Henry Miller and the making of Tropic of Cancer, By Frederick Turner
Your support helps us to tell the story
This election is still a dead heat, according to most polls. In a fight with such wafer-thin margins, we need reporters on the ground talking to the people Trump and Harris are courting. Your support allows us to keep sending journalists to the story.
The Independent is trusted by 27 million Americans from across the entire political spectrum every month. Unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock you out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. But quality journalism must still be paid for.
Help us keep bring these critical stories to light. Your support makes all the difference.
Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, first published in Paris in 1934 but banned in the United States until the Sixties, is a fictionalised, sexually explicit account of Miller's experiences as an expatriate in France.
Once dismissed as pornography, the novel is now recognised as a masterpiece, and Miller as a literary alchemist who made high art out of base pleasures. Frederick Turner's brief but illuminating study examines the book in relation to Miller's life (with a focus on his torrid marriages and his affair with Anaïs Nin) and American culture (in particular, the gritty humour that developed on the Western frontier). Like Paul Hendrickson's recent Hemingway's Boat, what it lacks in critical rigour it makes up for in the fine quality of its prose and its enjoyably digressive structure.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments