Tropic of Capricorn - Henry Miller

The American novelist Henry Miller (1891–1980) can be put on a par with such outstanding modernist writers of the 20th century as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett, because their works forever changed the very boundaries of literature as art. Miller's most famous novel Tropic of Сapricorn (1934), which is a kind of scandalous and explosive mixture of autobiography and fiction, tells about the turbulent bohemian life of a poor and eternally hungry American writer in Paris in the 1930s, in which it is easy to recognize the alter ego of the author himself. First published in France by the Obelisk Press, which specialized in pornographic English-language literature, Miller's work remained banned in the United States and Great Britain for about 30 years, which, however, did not prevent it from quickly gaining cult status, which it maintains to this day. Uncompromisingly frank and provocatively audacious, written by a writer with a fine sense of language and an artist's observant eye, Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn is one of the cornerstones of 20th-century modernist literature, and even today it makes us question everything we know about art, freedom and morality.