Penguin Modern Classics: Tropic of Cancer

‘I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive’

Henry Miller’s blazing first novel follows a young American writer as he makes his way through 1930s bohemian Paris, encountering penniless artists, pimps, ‘prostitutes like wilted flowers’, princesses, drunks, hustlers and sexual adventurers. Banned as pornographic and the subject of several obscenity trials, Tropic of Cancer defied the conventions of its day and of language itself: a verbally dazzling, carnivalesque hymn to freedom and being alive that remade the modern novel.