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  • Published: 29 July 2015
  • ISBN: 9780141399133
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $22.99

Tropic Of Cancer




Shocking, banned and the subject of obscenity trials, Miller's first novel is a Penguin Modern Classic for the first time

One of the most scandalous and influential books of the 20th century, Tropic of Cancer redefined the novel. Set in Paris in the 1930s, it features a starving American writer who lives a bohemian life among prostitutes, pimps, and artists. Promptly banned in the US and the UK because it was considered pornographic, Tropic of Cancer continued to be distributed in France and smuggled into other countries. When it was first published in the US in 1961, it led to more than 60 obscenity trials until a historic ruling by the Supreme Court defined it as a work of literature. Long hailed as a truly liberating book, daring and uncompromising, Tropic of Cancer is a cornerstone of modern literature that asks us to reconsider everything we know about art, freedom, and morality.

  • Published: 29 July 2015
  • ISBN: 9780141399133
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $22.99

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Praise for Tropic Of Cancer

At last an unprintable book that is fit to read

Ezra Pound

A momentous event in the history of modern writing

Samuel Beckett

One of the ten or twenty great novels of our century, a revolution in consciousness equal to The Sun Also Rises

Norman Mailer

Read him for five pages, ten pages, and you feel the peculiar relief that comes not so much from understanding as from being understood. 'He knows all about me,' you feel; 'he wrote this especially for me'. It is as though you could hear a voice speaking to you, a friendly American voice, with no humbug in it, no moral purpose, merely an implicit assumption that we are all alike

George Orwell

The book that forever changed the way American literature would be written

Erica Jong