Book Review 059 / Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

 

Tropic of Cancer 

by Henry Miller

1934

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 59 / Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)

April 21, 2016

George Orwell was an early defender of Miller, and in his 1940 essay ‘Inside the Whale’ wrote –

“I earnestly counsel anyone who has not done so to read …Tropic of Cancer. With a little ingenuity, or by paying a little over the published price, you can get hold of it, and even if parts of it disgust you, it will stick in your memory.”

He went on to say

“It is also an ‘important’ book, in a sense different from the sense in which that word is generally used. As a rule novels are spoken of as ‘important’ when they are either a ‘terrible indictment’ of something or other or when they introduce some technical innovation. Neither of these applies to Tropic of Cancer. Its importance is merely symptomatic. Here in my opinion is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past. Even if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance; and after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses. Symptomatically, that is more significant than the mere fact that five thousand novels are published in England every year and four thousand nine hundred of them are tripe. It is a demonstration of the impossibility of any major literature until the world has shaken itself into its new shape.”

George Orwell / Inside the Whale

George Orwell

Inside the Whale

The 100 best novels / No 59 / Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)

I

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 praised it were T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Aldous Huxley, John dos Passos, Ezra Pound — on the whole, not the writers who are in fashion at this moment. And in fact the subject matter of the book, and to a certain extent its mental atmosphere, belong to the twenties rather than to the thirties.

Hoki Tokuda / Marriage of Inconvenience

She wasn’t really a blind woman—she only played one in the movies.

Last week we watched Meiko Kaji’s Kaidan nobori ryu, aka Blind Woman’s Curse, and were too busy being cute with our summary of the film to mention that the blind woman was played by Hiroko (Hoki) Tokuda, who is better known to many people as author Henry Miller’s last wife. When they met she was working as a lounge pianist in L.A. and Miller, who had established himself as one of the most important American writers ever, was living in Pacific Palisades. Tokuda told the New York Times in 2011: “Henry started asking every week to meet me. I realized he just wanted a Japanese woman to add to his collection, and I would always ask myself, ‘Why me?’ Soon after we met, he started telling people he was going to marry me.” And marry her he did in September 1967. She was twenty-nine and Miller, who had been born in 1891, was on the verge of turning seventy-six.

Henry Miller and Hoki Tokuda

By early 1970 Tokuda had left Miller and was back in Japan, where that year she filmed Blind Woman’s Curse. Miller died in 1980, and Tokuda is in Japan today, running a piano bar called Tropic of Cancer, after her ex-husband’s most famous book. She says her marriage with Miller was never consummated, which may or may not be true—Miller isn’t around to contradict her. She also says she only married him 

for a green card,and has even joked about him being a bad kisser. "Terrible," she describes it. "Wet." It strikes us as a bit cynical for her to pretend the marriage was an inconvenient mistake when she’s borrowing the name of his most famous book in order to brand her bar, but that’s just our opinion. In any case, being a pulp site, we just thought we should offer a little background info, since Tokuda was married to a guy who changed English language literature forever. The above photos both date from September 1967, when their love—if it ever existed—was new.

PULP INTERNATIONAL

Covers / Henry Miller / Tropic of Cancer

TROPIC OF CANCER

by Henry Miller

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The 100 best novels / No 59 / Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)

Henry and Hoki / Last word in love

Henry and Hoki: last word in love

Interview with Hoki Tokuda 

The 100 best novels / No 59 / Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)

The Australian newspaper

October, 1990

Entertainer Hoki Tokuda, the last wife of author Henry Miller, is alive and well and managing the exclusive Tropic of cancer nightclub in Tokyo. Mark Roeder tracked her down.

Norman Mailer idolised Henry Miller and described him as ‘the writer’s writer. The greatest llving writer of his time.’ He even wrote a, book devoted to Miller’s work called Genius and Lust.

But when good Ol’ Henry, by now in his 80s, was asked to comment on this 576 page ode to himself, he said. “I can’t understand it. Mailer’s a clever guy but his writing reminds me of a peterade, a French word for a series of little farts.”

Miller had a habit of puncturing egos. The bigger the ego the deeper he plunged his sword, and the sword became sharper with age.

One person who avoided Miller’s barbs during the twilight of his life was Hoki Tokuda, his last wife and last love. This beautiful Japanese-born singer and piano player was married to him from 1967 until she finally plucked up the courage to ask for a divorce the year before his death in 1980. She, perhaps more than any other living person, was close enough to witness how the ravages of age affected one of the more iconoclastic literary spirits of our time.

Hoki Tokuda

Henry Miller's last wife, Hoki Tokuda, remembers him, um, fondly?

The 100 best novels / No 59 / Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)

FEBRUARY 23, 2011 |  4:02 PM

Hoki Tokuda in her Tokyo bar, Tropic of Cancer.
Credit: Randi Lynn Beach

Writer Henry Miller was born in 1891, which sounds remarkably far away from the present day. But he lived a long -- and much-married  -- life, one that included wedding a much younger woman from Japan. Hoki Tokuda lived with Miller in Pacific Palisades; they were married from the late '60s to the late '70s, divorcing not long before Miller's death in 1980. Now Tokuda runs a piano bar in Tokyo, named for her ex-husband's most famous novel: Tropic of Cancer.

Hoki Tokuda and Henry Miller

But that doesn't mean she's sentimental about the man. She talked to John M. Glionna in Japan for this L.A. Times article.

"Henry started asking every week to meet me," she says. "I realized he just wanted a Japanese woman to add to his collection, and I would always ask myself, 'Why me?' Soon after we met, he started telling people he was going to marry me."

Brenda Venus / Friends and Mentors

Brenda Venus

Friends and Mentors

by Brenda Venus

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Fun in the Sun with long-time friend, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on the back of a friend’s yacht. What a beautiful, magnificent, perfect day!

I met Kareem while working out in my gym on San Vicente Blvd. in L.A. as I did every day for a few hours. My usual routine consisted of stretching before I hit the weights. One afternoon while on the mat completely extended in a ballet split, I looked up to a really tall man standing before me saying, “I’m a big fan of yours! I saw “The Eiger Sanction” three times and I’ve always wanted to meet you.” Still in my split position, I suggested that he consider playing basketball. He laughed heartily and said, “I do! I play for the Los Angeles Lakers!” Of course, I didn’t know anything about basketball or the LA Lakers at that time.

Very soon, he sent two tickets for front row seating to one of the biggest playoff games of the season. I went with a girlfriend and immediately became a fan of the team. The way in which they seemed to glide down the court, flying effortlessly through the air while reaching toward the sky to sink a basket reminded me of a great ballet performance. Kareem is a highly intelligent man, and reads all the time. He is a connoisseur of jazz, loves to travel, and he can speak on almost any subject with authority.

Tom Selleck

Ahh Selleck! I met Tom Selleck when I first arrived in L.A. We were actors trying to make our way in the world of film. Tom carried my books after class and we shared many earth shattering decisions about our careers. We studied together, went on casting calls, appeared in plays… always in search of a good part—a part that stimulated our minds and touched our hearts.

Tom was always supportive and worked hard at being the best. Humble is the word I would use. He has always been very humble. I love that quality in a man. And he is self-effacing – not afraid to laugh at himself even at the most embarrassing times. It’s rare that such a nice looking leading man can also joke about himself. Very rare, indeed! Oh, and his voice plays a big part in his success. It’s very unique. No one sounds quite like Selleck!

One sunny afternoon, he handed me a play entitled, “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof” by Tennessee Williams and asked if I would play Maggie to his Brick. Of course I said, “Yes!” being from the South and loving the sultry, sexy play. The last night we were performing the play, I got stuck in a compromising position on stage. Tom quickly saw the problem and came over to where I was standing and without missing a beat; he cleverly and with ease, unhooked my slip from the prop in which it was stuck. We were both terrified, but no one even noticed. That was an amazing night!

Today, when I run into Tom, he picks me up, twirls me around, and gives me the best

hug, ever. Selleck is always the same gracious and lovely man, no matter where or

when we meet. I love it when he wears khaki shorts. He definitely has the most

shapely legs. What a great friend…! Kinda like a big brother!

Eddie Murphy

48 Hours was Eddie Murphy’s first film, and I played a ‘lady of the night.’ He came straight out of “Saturday Night Live” and my friend and producer, Larry Gordon was certain that Eddie would be perfect as partner and side-kick to Nick Nolte. I needed a small role to keep my SAG insurance up to date, so I called and asked if I could play any character that had not yet been cast.

One day during lunch, I noticed that Eddie was eating alone and he seemed so very shy. It was his first day on the job, his first stint at a big role in a big movie and he didn’t know anyone in the cast. So I walked over, introduced myself, and told him that I was from the South… from the Deep South… from Mississippi. He looked up, grinned, his eyes twinkled and he asked me to sit down. We ate our lunch together every day after our first meeting. We talked and laughed, laughed and talked. And from that day forward, we formed a bond of mutual respect. I love his humor and intelligence. He’s never at a loss for words, stories — something timely and always hitting the core of his target.

Eddie is shy and rather timid. But when he speaks, a floodgate of insights and passions come spilling forth. There are few people with whom he will share the “Real Eddie,” and those few individuals feel very special because they know that he is selective with whom he shares his true nature. I like that about a man!

Aside from being one of the funniest men on the face of the earth, Eddie has a gift.

He’s a true comedian, a true entertainer. When he’s on stage, any stage as long as

there is an audience, he entertains, and he is brilliant!

Michael Douglas

I have always admired the way Michael Douglas has handled his celebrity through the years. Being the son of a well-renowned icon of film, Kirk Douglas, Michael worked his way up the ladder to success by learning both behind and in front of the camera techniques.

He strategically planned his moves like that of a grand chess master, securing the rights to films in which he had a passionate and moral interest. After which, he called various people that he thought might be interested in investing in his newly acquired projects. A good example of this is “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” starring Jack Nicholson. Michael received the rights to the novel from his dad, Kirk Douglas. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Michael went on to produce and star in so many beloved and memorable films.

In this photo, we’re eating dinner in a friend’s back yard in Santa Barbara, although I’d call it a tropical oasis with a waterfall and lake to the right of our table. The entire area glowed by candlelight which bounced off our faces as we chatted. We discussed Michael’s collection of fine wines, the delicious food we were eating, his favorite black Porsche Carrera and the divine music playing in the background. I love his style and elegance! After all, he married one of my dear friends.

Clint Eastwood

In this photo Clint Eastwood was telling me a funny story between takes of filming “The Eiger Sanction.” We were preparing to climb the North face of the Eiger, a treacherous mountain in the Swiss Alps. Whenever he could steal a moment from both directing and acting, he taught me about film-making, and being brave in the face of danger by his example…

While we were climbing a mountain in Utah, I lost my footing and slipped several feet down the mountain. Clint quickly realized that if I had moved a muscle, I would have fallen into the deep, dark, seemingly never ending abyss. He gently told me to keep looking up, never look down, and to be very still until he could make his way down to where I was dangling from a twig. He continued talking confidently and quietly as he came closer and closer.

Finally, after what seemed like a lifetime, he held out his long, strong arm and said, “Give me your hand.” Trustingly, I did so. Cautiously and carefully, he pulled me to safety. My heart was beating so fast when we reached the top of the mountain that I flew into his arms, in gratitude.

Clint gives true meaning to the words: He walks softly and carries a big stick! There are men who talk, and men who act. Clint acts… in more ways than one. He has developed into one of our finest actors and filmmakers of all time.

Yuri Smaltzoff

Yuri Smaltzoff was my ballet master. He honed my talents while supporting my dreams and desires. He always had a kind and encouraging word that pushed me forward to achieve my goals. He also taught me discipline, focus and hard work is the key to every successful person; that knowing exactly what I want and not giving up was his unfaltering advice.

He is one of the most positive and intelligent men that I have ever known. He supported my choice in flying to Moscow for opening night of a play that was performed by the Bolshoi Ballet in my honor. I was the guest of Vladimir Putin, but I was still a stranger in a strange, exotic and beautiful land.

Yuri gave me the courage that I dearly needed for that magnificent journey. It was indeed a memorable moment in time. From afar, Yuri was my anchor and guide throughout the gracious event of seeing and being welcomed by the vast beauty of Russia and her people. It was a ‘once in a lifetime’ adventure, and made possible due to Yuri Smalzoff’s positive encouragement. Yuri not only choreographed most of my ballets, but also my trip to the romantic city of Moscow.

Henry Miller

Henry Miller was my ultimate mentor! I was his muse. When I first met Henry, I was a film actress. After a few weeks of exchanging letters, phone calls and dinners, he began to encourage my writing ability. He said the most important aspect of writing is to speak from the heart about a subject you know well, sit down and do it! No excuses, no apologies… just write and write, and eventually you will have written something that is worthy to be read. He wrote me over four-thousand letters in only four years and I wrote him an equal amount. After his death, I published my first book, entitled, Dear Dear Brenda which are the three words in which Henry began writing most of his letters to me and always ended with another three words, J’ai taime.

I am grateful for his foresight, time, energy, support, humor but most of all… his unconditional love. I was blessed with the great fortune of knowing the genius of our century, and a wonderful human being who cared about humanity. He taught me to be myself, because that’s when a person is truly unique. His profound words of wisdom ring in my ear and beat in my heart every day. He believed in destiny and told me that we had been destined to meet. I know he was right! I cannot imagine what turn my life would have taken without the intervention of the late, great Henry Miller! I am truly blessed…

BRENDAVENUS

Henry Miller / Brenda Venus / Letters

Henry Miller / Brenda Venus 

LETTERS

During the final four years of his life, Henry Miller wrote over 1,500 love letters (over 4,000 pages!) to his muse, a beautiful Native American actress named Brenda Venus. Originally published by Morrow in 1986 – six years after Miller’s death – the voluminous correspondence was edited into an approximately 200-page book, with commentary by Venus. When it came out, the book received rave reviews, including a sensitive, insightful analysis by Noel Young in the Los Angeles Times.

Henry Miller’s death in 1980 brought an end to one of the most extraordinary romances ever conceived, coming as it did from the impassioned mind of a man nearly 90, admittedly a physical ruin, and the good graces of a young actress, aptly named Brenda Venus, in the prime of her life. For Miller, it was love at first sight, kindling an ardor that kept him alive for four more years. He did what he did best – he wrote; and he laid it all on the line in more than 1,000 letters from which this volume is drawn.

An ordinary man, blind in one eye and partially paralyzed, might have taken to bed and wasted away, but not Henry Miller. Instead, he fell hopelessly, shamelessly in love and spilled it out in letters to his dear Brenda, wallowing in a euphoria that lasted to his end. He worked himself into a lather, at least on paper, and lived for those Thursday nights when she appeared at his door, took him by his arm and drove him to dinner at his favorite Japanese restaurant in the Hollywood Hills. One stormy night, to spare him hobbling through the puddles in the parking lot, she simply picked him up and carried him upstairs to the entrance. He accepted this with aplomb and a jaunty smile.

This original 2-pge intimate letter is revealing, inspiring, and sensual in content. Miller's rhythmic pattern of repetitive descriptions with mixed metaphors remain crisp and exciting. Insight, carefully delivered at the price of sexual distraction. No one has ever or could ever do it better! What a master! That´s HENRY MILLER!

This caracter developtment is precise. The story is pushed along by delightful detail, with the interjection of vaguye interludes and intense innuendo. You have to love the may Henry uses acts and words. It´s like a little acid spinkled on a open wound in passing. Or... the delicacy and aplomb of a Walt Whitman or Lord Bryon. As much said by the unsaid and said by the saying.. like a fine bouquet it's intoxicanting.

Brenda Venus Sexy Intimate letter from Henry Miller $3,500

Henry Miller wrote this 1978 letter to me after I had asked him many questions about his love affair with 2nd wife, June. She was the 1 & only true love of his life… June inspired him to be the great writer he became while living in Paris.

BRENDAVENUS

The 100 best novels / No 59 / Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 59

 Tropic of Cancer

by Henry Miller (1934)

The US novelist’s debut revelled in a Paris underworld of seedy sex and changed the course of the novel – though not without a fight with the censors

Robert McCrum

Monday 3 November 2014

W

hen the English, later the American, novel began in the late 17th century, it was profoundly associated with transgression. John Bunyan (No 1 in this series) wrote in prison. Daniel Defoe (No 2) was put in the stocks. Writers of all sorts were seen (and saw themselves) as outsiders, renegades and troublemakers, an important theme in the history of the English novel. The more professional novelists became, with audiences to please, the further they moved from their reprobate origins. So it’s good, as we move deeper into the 20th century, to find a writer such as Henry Miller disrupting the still waters of convention with shock and outrage.

In American literature, the renegade strand had found its richest expression in the genius Mark Twain, who went out of his way to oppose the “genteel tradition” of Emerson and Longfellow. By the 20th century, however, the renegade frontier was to be found not in the wild west, but in Paris. Miller, the down-and-out literary enragé, revelled in a new frontier of seedy desperation, where there were “prostitutes like wilted flowers and pissoirs filled with piss-soaked bread”. He and his muse Anaïs Nin flourished here – resolute, isolated and stoical in pursuit of their new aesthetic. Nin memorably recalled that, while her lover was mellow in his speech, there was always a “small, round, hard photographic lens in his blue eyes”.The shabby, 38-year-old American with unblinking camera vision who arrived on the Left Bank of Paris in 1930 was the quintessence of abject failure. All he had going for him was creative rage, mixed with the artistic vision of the truly avant garde. “I start tomorrow on the Paris book,” wrote Henry Miller. “First person, uncensored, formless – fuck everything!”

Henry Miller
Photo by Brassaï

Miller was as good as his word, within the opening pages of the novel whose working title was “Crazy Cock”, he was celebrating Tania’s “warm cunt”, declaring that he “will ream out every wrinkle” with his “prick six inches long”. His obsessive reporting of his sexual exploits, and his low-life rootlessness, is the novel’s subject (there is no plot), a merciless assault on convention. Next to Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934) and even Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Miller’s visceral candour was off the charts of contemporary taste, in tone as much as language. Miller’s delight in rubbing the reader’s face in filth was intoxicating and influential. His “fuck everything” would inspire Kerouac, Genet, Burroughs, Mailer and Ginsberg, among others. Not bad for a man who had once written: “Why does nobody want what I write?”

A note on the text

Miller’s sprawling masterpiece was launched by the Obelisk Press, a French publisher of soft pornography as Tropic of Cancer, with a cover by Maurice Girodias, who would later become famous as the leading French publisher of erotic literature. Wrapped in an explicit warning (“Not to be imported into Great Britain or USA”), it set a new gold standard for graphic language and explicit sexuality. From the outset, Miller’s “barbaric yawp” shook US censorship and inflamed American literary sensibility to its core. Tropic would remain banned for a generation, by which time it had become part of postwar cultural folklore, smuggled into the US wrapped in scarves and underwear. Rarely has a book had such thrilling and desperate underground beginnings.

The outsider status of Miller’s novel combined with its subject (life and love at the extremes of existence) recommended the book to writers like Orwell and Beckett. In his essay Inside the Whale (1940), Orwell wrote: “I earnestly counsel anyone who has not done so to read at least Tropic of Cancer. With a little ingenuity, or by paying a little over the published price, you can get hold of it, and even if parts of it disgust you, it will stick in your memory ... Here in my opinion is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.”

For his part Samuel Beckett described it as “a momentous event in the history of modern writing”. In the US, as an outright challenge to the censor, Edmund Wilson noted that “The tone of the book is undoubtedly low. Tropic of Cancer... is the lowest book of any real literary merit that I ever remember to have read.”

Miller’s vision prevailed, in the end. Finally, in 1961, the year after Lady Chatterley’s Lover secured the right to be published in the UK, Tropic of Cancer triumphed in its battle with the US censor and was published by the Grove Press. The timing of this landmark verdict did not favour the ageing iconoclast. At first, his book was treated as the fruit of Miller’s complex relationship with Anaïs Nin, who was an object of veneration within the American feminist movement. Later, feminists like Kate Millett denounced Miller as a male chauvinist, while Jeanette Winterson asked, perceptively: “Why do men revel in the degradation of women?” This question still hangs over the pages of Tropic like a rebuke, but (with a few misgivings) I’m still going to add it to this series.

Three more from Henry Miller

Black Spring (1936); The Tropic of Capricorn (1939); Sexus (1949).

THE GUARDIAN

THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH

000 The 100 best novels: an introduction by Robert McCrum

001 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)

002 Robinson Crusoe by Danie Defoe (1719)

003 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

004 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson  (1748)

005 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding  (1749)

006 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759)

007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)

008 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)

009 Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock(1818)

010 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1833)

011 Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli  (1845)

012 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)

013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) 

014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)  

015 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)

016 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)

017  Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851) 

018 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)

019 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)

020 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)

021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)

022 The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (1875)

023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)

024 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

025 Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome  (1889)

026  The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)

027  The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)

028  New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)

029 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)

030 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)

031 Dracula by Bram Stoker  (1897)

032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)

033 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)

034 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)

035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)

037 Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)

038 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908) 

039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)

041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
052 Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)

053 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)

054 The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929)

055 As I Lay Dying  by William Faulkner  (1930)

056 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

057 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)

058 Nineteen Nineteen by John Dos Passos (1932)

059 Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)

060 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)

070 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell  (1949)

071 The End of the Affair by Graham Greene  (1951) 

072 The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)

073 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)

074 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)

075 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

076 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)

077 Voss by Patrick White (1957)

078 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

079 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1960)

080 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962) 

082 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

083 A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964) 

084 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)
085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966) 

086 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)

087 Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (1971)

088 Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)

089 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)

090 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979) 

091 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)