Tropic of Cancer unabashedly depicts Miller's escapades as a down-and-out writer in Paris during the early 1930's, "bumming around" Montparnasse with a colorful, earthy, and rebellious group of expatriates and artists. Miller's prose rages and rampages with very graphic sexual thoughts and ideas shocking to a conformist world. His intent is an assault on convention. And while he skewers moral hypocrisy, Miller champions the role of the artist in society with the same gusto he celebrates life and sex. An incalculable influence on the Beat Poets and an inspiration to generations of young writers, the always controversial Henry Miller has been both applauded and damned, but no one ever denies that he is a true original - and a great American writer. Published in France in 1934, Tropic of Cancer was banned in the United States until 1961, when its printing led to the overturning of America's obscenity laws. Now it is regarded as an American classic.