For nearly thirty years, the United States treated a memoir like contraband, smuggled across borders in suitcases. This episode follows Henry Miller through his destitute Paris years of the late 1920s and early 1930s, when he was hungry, homeless, and shattered by separation from his second wife June, and shows how he reframed that suffering as bitter nourishment for a new kind of writing. We meet the friends who kept him alive, including Michael Fraenkel and Alfred Perles, and Anais Nin, who became his editor, lover, and financial savior by borrowing money from psychoanalyst Otto Rank to fund publication.

We examine the stream-of-consciousness style, the abandoned title Crazy Cock, the meaning behind Tropic of Cancer, and the influences of Dostoevsky, Rabelais, and Walt Whitman. Then we trace the 1934 customs ban, smuggled copies sold at the Gotham Book Mart, the bootlegger Jacob Brussel’s three-year prison sentence, the failed 1950 ACLU challenge, and Barney Rosset’s 1961 Grove Press edition that triggered more than sixty obscenity suits before the 1964 Supreme Court ruling that a work must be judged as a whole.

• Poverty and heartbreak in Paris as the pressure cooker behind the book
• Anais Nin’s loan from Otto Rank and her preface praising the manuscript
• Why isolated passages, not whole works, decided obscenity cases before 1964
• Charles Rembar’s state-by-state defense of prosecuted booksellers
• George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, the Beats, and Erica Jong on Miller’s legacy