Tropic of Cancer #

Author Henry Miller
Date July 9, 2026

I started reading Tropic of Cancer at the beginning of the first few truly hot days of summer. Every day I felt muggy and always a bit uncomfortably damp, even while indoors and with my fan running nearby; I always felt in need of a shower. That feeling has been, not sustained, but amplified by my reading of this book. I understood from conversations with friends and from the blurb on the back of the book that it is raunchy and quite obscene, but a blurb can’t do it justice. I’m sure it’s fair to say, though, that I haven’t read very many books that inhabit that sort of character, this being probably the first.