Because Tropic of Cancer is a part of a multibook sequence, Miller purposely withholds some very important elements of his art from the narrative. To balance the bleak landscape of Tropic of Cancer, Miller reaches back to a Utopian vision of the past in descriptions of his early childhood in Black Spring (1938), and then sets both the Attic landscape of Greece ("land of light") and the rugged terrain of Big Sur as correctives from the natural world in The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), and Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1957). In addition, the full scale of the social disaster which Tropic of Cancer delineates is measured by the rapid decline of the men and women Miller describes from Black Spring to Tropic of Cancer, and by the vision of another "Paris" which Miller offers in some of the chapters of Black Spring. Perhaps most important...