SOURCE: "Inside the Whale," in his The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: An Age Like This, 1920–1940, Vol. 1, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968, pp. 493-502.

An English novelist and essayist, Orwell is the author of such well-known works as Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949) as well as the autobiographical narrative Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). His essays evince a profoundly moral concern for the victims of economic, political, and social exploitation. In the following excerpt from an essay that was originally published in New Directions in Prose and Poetry in 1940, he applauds Miller's use of vernacular and poetic language in Tropic of Cancer to vividly portray the lives of impoverished American expatriates in 1930s Paris.

When Henry Miller's novel, Tropic of Cancer, appeared in 1935, it was greeted with rather cautious praise, obviously conditioned in some cases by a fear of seeming to enjoy pornography. Among the people who...