What we write about fiction is never an objective response to a text; it is always part of a bigger mythmaking — the story we are telling ourselves about ourselves. That story changes. George Orwell, writing in 1940 about Henry Miller, has very different preoccupations from Kate Millet writing about Miller in 1970. Orwell doesn’t notice that Miller-women are semi­human sex objects. In fact, his long essay “Inside the Whale” barely mentions women at all. Millet does notice that half the world has been billeted to the whorehouse, and wonders what this tells us about both Henry Miller and the psyche and sexuality of the American male.

Norman Mailer needed Miller to be like Shakespeare (this is plain wrong, but the need is interesting); Erica Jong wanted to be Athena to Miller’s Zeus — born straight out of his head and saving him from the Feminist Furies in her book “The Devil at Large” (1993).

And now? It is some 50 years since “Tropic of Cancer” was published in the United States by Grove Press. First published in Paris in 1934 by Obelisk, a soft-porn imprint, it had been banned as obscene in America until a landmark legal victory overturned the ban, allowing Grove to print it legally in 1961. The book became an instant best seller, and Henry Miller stood as the priapic prophet of sexual freedom.

The entire article is at the NYT; it is both a good introduction to current views on Henry Miller but also into the back rooms of publishes that are more interested in getting new and possibly controversial literature out to readers everywhere than they might be in printing a best-selling and getting rich.