Rakova obratnica

From a seemingly marginal literary phenomenon that even physically appears outside the motherland – in the notorious Obelisk publishing house in Paris – the forty-year-old and self-taught author publishes his first, shocking, quasi-autobiographical novel. Thus, from an outsider excess of limited scope, from an anarchic, "asocial", individualistic, scandalous gesture that appears at a time when the main fashion of Western literary life is "social literature", Tropic of Cancer gradually but surely moved towards a central position in the motherland, American literature, entered the literary tradition as one of the main heirs and transmitters of the legitimate traditional current from Thoreau and Whitman to the Beats and Norman Mailer. So, although we may not agree with the American poet Karl Shapiro who called Miller "the greatest living author" in 1960, nor with Mailer himself who called him a "genius" and only slightly less a Dostoevsky, today we certainly see quite clearly that this is a writer who has had a liberating influence on our era more than anyone else, and thus far surpassed the boundaries of his own literature... He, to expand Mailer's image, is moving away hair by hair from the "Great Muff of Knowledge".