Tropic Of Cancer

The book Tropic of Cancer had a very Critical reception as the large amounts of sexuality in the book was just unheard of at the time. Yet to many literature people it was great piece of work. Here are some opinions of the novel

George Orwell called this novel

"the most important book of the mid-1930s [and Miller is] the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.


Samuel Beckett hailed it as "a momentous event in the history of modern writing


Some were not so positive though
Edmund Wilson said of the novel:

The tone of the book is undoubtedly low; The Tropic of Cancer, in fact, from the point of view both of its happening and of the language in which they are conveyed, is the lowest book of any real literary merit that I have ever remember to have read... there is a strange amenity of temper and style which bathes the whole composition even when it is disgusting or tiresome.


In his dissent from the majority holding that the book was not obscene, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Michael Musmanno wrote Cancer is "not a book. It is a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity