Tropic of Cancer is an autobiographical novel by Henry Miller that is best known as "notorious for its candid sexuality", with the resulting social controversy considered responsible for the "free speech that we now take for granted in literature.

[4] Its publication in 1961 in the United States by Grove Press led to obscenity trials that tested American laws on pornography in the early 1960s.

[5]: 109  In 1934, Jack Kahane's Obelisk Press published the book with financial backing from Nin, who had borrowed the money from Otto Rank.

[10]: xxxi–xxxiii Set in France (primarily Paris) during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Tropic of Cancer centers on Miller's life as a struggling writer.

Late in the novel, Miller explains his artistic approach to writing the book itself, stating: Up to the present, my idea of collaborating with myself has been to get off the gold standard of literature.

[10]: 243 Combining autobiography and fiction, some chapters follow a narrative of some kind and refer to Miller's actual friends, colleagues, and workplaces; others are written as stream-of-consciousness reflections that are occasionally epiphanic.

As a struggling writer, Miller describes his experience living among a community of bohemians in Paris, where he intermittently suffers from hunger, homelessness, squalor, loneliness, and despair over his recent separation from his wife.

I understood why it is that here, at the very hub of the wheel, one can embrace the most fantastic, the most impossible theories, without finding them in the least strange; it is here that one reads again the books of his youth and the enigmas take on new meanings, one for every white hair.

The treadmill stretches away to infinitude, the hatches are closed down tight, logic runs rampant, with bloody cleaver flashing.

[12] Other than the first-person narrator "Henry Miller",[10]: 108  the major characters include: O Tania, where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs?

[17] A copyright-infringing edition of the novel was published in New York City in 1940 by "Medusa" (Jacob Brussel); its last page claimed its place of publication to be Mexico.

"[23][24] Rembar successfully argued two appeals cases, in Massachusetts and New Jersey,[21][25] although the book continued to be judged obscene in New York and other states.

[33] Orwell focused on Miller's descriptions of sexual encounters, which he deemed significant for their "attempt to get at real facts," and which he saw as a departure from dominant trends.

"[35] Returning to the novel in the essay "Inside the Whale" (1940), George Orwell wrote the following: I earnestly counsel anyone who has not done so to read at least Tropic of Cancer.

Even if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance....[36]Samuel Beckett hailed it as "a momentous event in the history of modern writing.

"[37] Norman Mailer, in his 1976 book on Miller entitled Genius and Lust, called it "one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century, a revolution in consciousness equal to The Sun Also Rises".

[38] Edmund Wilson said of the novel: The tone of the book is undoubtedly low; The Tropic of Cancer, in fact, from the point of view both of its happenings and of the language in which they are conveyed, is the lowest book of any real literary merit that I ever remember to have read... there is a strange amenity of temper and style which bathes the whole composition even when it is disgusting or tiresome.

[39]: 295–296  In 1980, Anatole Broyard described Tropic of Cancer as "Mr. Miller's first and best novel," showing "a flair for finding symbolism in unobtrusive places" and having "beautiful sentence[s].