This article explores the significance that author identity held for Miller by re-examining the economic difficulties he faced in attempting to publish. Biographers of Miller have attempted to unravel the intentional misrepresentation in Miller’s novels without fully explaining why the author would choose to dissemble and yet simultaneously state that his works were truthful accounts of his life. Henry Miller has long been an outlying twentieth-century American author, and has often been criticised for the alterations of his personal history in his semi-autobiographical novels. Miller presents individual performances and exuberant excess as an antidote to harsh economic policies in a way that speaks to today’s debates about ‘‘hard currency’’ and the need for austerity economics. In his attempts to create a language and form that ‘‘flow,’’ Miller reveals how nationalism, economic strictures, and literary conventions promote hoarding, create conflicts, and mask the experience of everyday life. In his depiction of prostitution and embodied transactions, Miller offers alternate modes of circulation and currency, which challenge existing economic structures and literary genres and the ways they regulate and reify conventional values.

Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934) provides a unique modernist representation of the economic warfare of the Great Depression, as evident in Miller’s claims for ‘‘going off the gold standard.’’ This essay explores what such claims reveal about the connections between economic regimes and the symbolic structures which underpin both cultural production and the experience of everyday life.

Henry miller 1934