![]() The Act also gave the Secretary of the Treasury discretionary authority to “admit the so-called classics or books of recognized and established literary merit. This Act, among its other provisions, prohibited the importation into the United States of books, pamphlets, paintings, drawings or images deemed to be obscene, and authorized their forfeiture and destruction. The government’s authority to confiscate and destroy books derived from The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. ![]() The General Counsel found the book obscene and ordered the Customs Bureau to destroy it. This copy was seized by a Customs Inspector in New York and sent to the Office of the General Counsel of the Treasury Department for review. In gratitude, Miller sent Meyer an inscribed copy via the German vessel Deutschland. Meyer immediately read the book, and then wrote Miller a letter expressing his admiration. Hiler passed though American customs without incident, and distributed copies of the book to an assortment of readers, including his father Meyer. He gave several copies to his good friend Hilaire Hiler, an American painter about to return to New York to open a studio. ![]() Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller Miller was eager to get copies of the book to readers in America, especially his friends, fellow writers, and literary critics. The first edition was a run of 1,000 copies. Even in Paris, the book was offered for sale by subscription only, and copies were hard to find in Paris bookstores, where they were kept hidden under the counter. Anticipating that Tropic of Cancer would be banned by censors, Kahane wrapped the book in a white band on which was printed in large black letters MUST NOT BE TAKEN INTO GREAT BRITAIN OR U.S.A. The book was published by Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press. In 1931, he began transforming these experiences into what he called his “Paris book,” a mélange of anecdotes, reflections, character sketches, scabrous outbursts and surreal flights of language held together by the distinctive voice of its first-person narrator, a fictionalized version of the man named Henry Miller. Miller lived a hand-to-mouth existence on the streets of Paris, consorting with prostitutes and other expatriate artists he met in cafés, and surviving on their generosity. In 1930, at the urging of his second wife June Mansfield, Miller moved to Paris in a desperate bid to find himself as a writer. Miller had been writing novels since 1922, but his first three efforts, written primarily while he was living in Brooklyn and New York, had not been accepted for publication, and he regarded them as failures. Thus began one of the most extraordinary and long relationships in American literary history. ![]() One of the new censor’s first acts was to place Tropic of Cancer on the list of books prohibited from importation into the United States. In that same month, 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean in Washington, D.C., the Secretary of the Treasury appointed a young Baltimore lawyer as the official U.S. In September 1934 the American writer Henry Miller, age 42, had published in Paris his autobiographical novel Tropic of Cancer. ![]()
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