The protagonist of Tropic of Cancer (a doppelgänger for Miller) is an adventurer who, Turner writes, has been sent “on an exploration. The series aims to tell “a new and innovative story about American history and culture” through these icons, and Turner’s story traces Miller’s mid-twentieth-century ramble back through the dark passages of US history, to the young nation’s “buffalo hunters, backwoodsmen, Indian killers, and outlaws of the hinterlands and urban slums,” claiming that Miller (consciously or not) modeled himself and his books on the American-as-outlaw archetype. Turner’s volume is part of Yale University Press’s Icons of America series, which covers national treasures such as the Statue of Liberty, the hamburger, Jackson Pollock, Bob Dylan, Fred Astaire, a bunch of other men, and just one gal: the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. Now, in Renegade, scholar Frederick Turner reassesses the work, making the case that the book and its author are as quintessentially American as Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. This kind of hyperbole marked his audacious, pornographic monologue of a first novel, Tropic of Cancer, which was published in the US fifty years ago (after the Supreme Court overturned a quarter-century ban). In a letter to his lover, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller wrote that he was possibly the only writer in our time who has had the chance to write only as he pleased.
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