No American writer in Paris during the thirties captured so completely the experience of his generation as Henry Miller. He made Paris his permanent residence in 1930, and he stayed until 1939, absorbing and celebrating the city which so many American artists called home in the twenties. By the time Miller arrived, however, Montparnasse was in decline. Under the shadow of the Great Depression, many of the celebrated salons disbanded, and many of the leading expatriate artists and critics abandoned Paris. Henry Miller, alone it seemed, recorded the birth of a terrible beauty in the midst of the ruins of the thirties. The decay of a culture nourished him. His life and art, his actual and imagined experiences, became virtually indistinguishable in Paris. The result, published four years after his arrival, was Tropic of Cancer (1934), Miller's narrative of a lost generation which--grown weary of its dreams--woke to a world in...