SOURCE: "The Pitching of Love's Mansion in the Tropics of Henry Miller," in Seven Contemporary Authors, edited by Thomas B. Whitbread, University of Texas Press, 1966, pp. 129-53.

Friedman is an American critic and educator. In the following essay, he remarks on past critical opinion and legal actions concerning Tropic of Cancer, examines contradictions in some of the book's central themes, and concludes that Tropic of Cancer is ultimately a work of negation rather than affirmation.

More than any other year, 1926 climaxed the era of the so-called "Lost Generation" of American expatriate writers, although by then almost all their important documents, from Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio in 1919 to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in 1925, had already been written, published, and received. The year 1926 was climactic, however, since that year was Hemingway's—it was the year of The Sun Also Rises and it was the last of the Moveable...