Tropic of Cancer

This respectable office building at 338 rue Saint-Honore was once home to one of the more scandalous publishing houses of the twentieth century.

When he arrived in Paris in 1930, Henry Miller found the walls of his new city plastered with lurid posters calling for public vigilance against the scourges of syphilis and cancer. Miller was fascinated with the posters and the depiction of the crab in particular may have been an inspiration for the title of his novel, Tropic of Cancer.

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.

One of the first Parisian neighborhoods to draw Henry Miller's fascination was the confluence of streets around the boulevard Beaumarchais in the eleventh arrondissement. Of particular appeal was a little tabac where the local prostitutes gathered in the evening.

The American Express office at 11 rue Scribe has been serving tourists in Paris for more than one hundred years since its opening in 1900. Henry Miller made extensive use of these services throughout his years in Paris as the American Express grew to be strongly associated with his personal misery.

Paris in the winter had all the stark angles of bare sycamores and gray steeples, but we found it welcoming and friendly. So crucial to Miller during the Depression, food became our main preoccupation, being only a few blocks from the markets of Rue Montorgueil.