Chicago Tribune

In Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller introduces a character named Peckover who works with him at the Paris Edition of the Chicago Tribune. Peckover is presented as a proofreader and an Englishman, but the model for this character was actually a sportswriter from San Francisco named Madison Kirby.

I like my cheap hotel—like its crazy wallpaper, the stains on the wall, the odor of mildew, the broken things, etc. Even the noise! For I have selected the very busiest district imaginable—one short block from the Rue Lafayette, from Chicago Tribune, from Folies-Bergère—etc. I like the bustle and smell and sweat and dirt—for a while anyhow.

The Chicago Tribune staff and taxi drivers were joined at Gillotte’s by other denizens of the Paris nightlife, notably the local prostitutes and their pimps. It was just the sort of setting, bringing together the Paris literati with the working class and demi-mondaine, all mixed with copious quantities of food and wine, at which Miller was in his element.

In March of 1932, Henry Miller lived at the Hôtel Cronstadt for about two weeks while waiting for repairs to be completed on his new apartment in Clichy. He was expecting the move to Clichy to deliver him from the circuit of cheap hotels he had been traveling since arriving in Paris more than a year before…

Miller’s ironic position as a proofreader of stock market quotations during the midst of The Great Depression afforded him a unique perspective. From his perch at the proofreaders desk he surveyed the collapsing world economy with the sense of detached amusement that permeates Tropic of Cancer...

In an October 1931 column for the Chicago Tribune, Wambly Bald published a short biographical sketch of Miller which claimed that he occasionally spent the night sleeping on the bench outside the Closerie des Lilas…