Penguin Modern Classics: Tropic of Capricorn

‘It was the ideal street – for a boy, a lover, a maniac, a drunkard, a crook, a lecher, a thug’

In 1920s New York one Henry V. Miller, personnel manager of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Co., spends his days hiring and firing a succession of wasters, maniacs, perverts, ex-cons, idiots and whores – while also writing the most important work of literature ever published and enjoying increasingly outrageous erotic exploits. Banned for thirty years, this riotous companion piece to Tropic of Cancer is a frank portrait of the Brooklyn of Miller’s youth – its skyscrapers and sewers, its lusts and dejection – and a savage attack on America.