In 1938 Edmund Wilson called
Tropic of Cancer "the epitaph for the whole generation of American writers and artists that migrated to Paris after the war."
Miller was undoubtedly the leading American artist in the twilight of expatriation in Paris, but he felt that Wilson had misread his work. "I am the hero, and the book is myself," Miller insisted. For the author--the American in exile who had made himself the hero of his own narrative--Tropic of Cancer was foremost an act of self-liberation, a new beginning, a celebration of personal rebirth in a dying world. In Paris Miller discovered a new heroic spirit in himself; he translated this as directly as possible into his art. Tropic of Cancer was an epitaph--the end of an old phase--but also the beginning of a new phase in American literature.
During the thirties those who could procure copies of Tropic of Cancer and the works which followed usually praised Miller's autobiographies in novelistic form. In 1939 Edwin Muir found Tropic of Cancer a "shocking book" which pierced "deeper into the disease of our existence than any other." He pronounced it "a work of genius, terrifying and comic." The same year, George Orwell, although repelled by the apolitical nature of Miller's narratives, wrote in "Inside the Whale" that "in the remaining years of free speech any novel worth reading will follow more or less along the lines that Miller has followed." Praising the colloquial style of Tropic of Cancer , Orwell argued that Miller was "the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past." Ezra Pound and T.
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