There are no more books to be written, thank God.' Everything that was literature has fallen from me.

'A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. Or as he himself puts it in Tropic of Cancer's opening pages: So, like a bull in a literary china shop, Miller let his writing loose as a kind of cure-all for this state. And art, once the greatest expression of what it means to be human, had become little more than a decoration to conceal and soothe mankind's epic failure. In Miller's worldview the human race had arrived at a point where it was no longer truly living life, but just existing, mistaking its own thoughts and fears for reality. With books like Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and Black Spring, Miller created a new kind of writing - part autobiography, part philosophical treatise, and part a strangely American brand of street corner storytelling. The obsession with this aspect of Miller's work is unfortunate, however, because it obscures the fact that the sexual liberty he claimed was really part of a larger quest for personal, social, and artistic freedom - a quest which had profound effects that still reverberate through western literature and culture today. This is understandable: Miller did most of his important writing in a period in which this subject was highly taboo in English-language literature, and it was his deliberate challenge to this state of affairs that helped to forge his legend.

For the casual reader, it has always been Miller's frank and graphic descriptions of sex that have fuelled this controversy.

Books like tropic of cancer