Henry Miller was an American author notorious for his writing about sexual themes. The prosecution of Miller's Tropic of Cancer in the United States in 1961 was part of a series of obscenity trials that tested American laws on pornography. The U.S. Supreme Court overruled the state court findings of obscenity and declared the book a work of literature; it was one of the notable events in what has come to be known as the sexual revolution. Elmer Gertz, the lawyer who successfully argued the initial case for the novel's publication in Illinois, became a lifelong friend of Miller's. Some of Miller's essays on art and obscenity were published in the Angry Penguins magazine and he also sustained a correspondence with Robert Close during Close's prosecution for obscenity in Victoria in the late 1940s. Miller is known for breaking existing literary forms and developing a new sort of novel that draws upon the elements of autobiography, social criticism, Surrealist free association, mysticism and philosophy. Many of Miller's books were banned in Australia between the 1940s and 1960s.
