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“There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt.”

Many have cited Henry Miller’s 1934 scandalous masterpiece Tropic of Cancer (working title: Crazy Cock) as the trigger to their sexual awakening, therefore it should come as little surprise that the period of time Miller penned the book marked a shift in values, mentality and location within his own life.

Working on the novel between 1930 and 1934, the text was written during Miller’s “nomadic life in Paris”. Leaving behind a disintegrating marriage and an unhappy career in America, the author moved to the French capital and immersed himself in its seedy underbelly.

Within the text, Miller fictionalises his racy adventures as a struggling writer, living amongst the bohemians of the city’s Left Bank streets and the down-and-out painters and writers of Montparnasse. Splicing autobiography with fiction, real-life friends with imagined figures, a crude charm takes readers on a romp through Paris’ wild nights – via Miller obsessively reporting his erotic exploits. Yet it’s not all smut: Miller mediates on the human condition throughout, contemplating his own emotional state as he suffers from hunger, homelessness, squalor, loneliness and despair.

Written in a rhapsodic manner that pulls the reader along, Tropic of Cancer’s renegade prose and lack of traditional plot carved a genuinely new and exciting avant-garde writing style that proved a major inspiration on Beat Generation writers like Jack Kerouac and William S Burroughs, and beyond.

Yet not everyone saw the book for its brilliance. Banned in the US and the UK for more than thirty years because it was considered pornographic, bookstores sold the novel under the counter; smuggled home disguised under dust jackets from other books. And when the novel was first published in the US in 1961, it led to more than 60 obscenity trials until a historic ruling by the Supreme Court defined it as a work of literature.

However, Miller got no enjoyment from the ruling, claiming that readers were consuming his work for its shock value, getting off on its vulgarity while completely bypassing the hypocrisy and shame that lay behind it. In a 1972 interview with Digby Diehl published in the Los Angeles Times, Miller said, “More and more I’ve grown disgusted with my readers. I revealed everything about myself, and I find that they’re interested in this sensational life. But I was trying to give them more than that.”