Rarely can there have been a writer as difficult to pin down as Henry Miller. His intermingling of his own life experiences with extreme flights of fancy and imagination have made it difficult to place his novels neatly into autobiography or fiction. Miller often contradicted himself on how his work should be read, frequently playing semantics with what the word “truth” really meant. In Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer, Frederick Turner aims to place Tropic of Cancer as an autobiographical work, whilst situating it within a wider milieu of American outlaw folklore.

Turner engages easily with Miller's unhappy childhood and difficult adolescence, providing an accessible entry into Miller's world, whilst acknowledging that before his years in Paris we really only have Miller's memories and interpretation of this time in his life. Miller's early years were marked by the dysfunction of his family life and his identification with the juvenile delinquents of his neighbourhood in Brooklyn. Turner draws a fascinating comparison between Miller's hero worship and an early tradition within frontier America, of the hero outlaw, living outwith societal norms and control. The chapter entitled “Folklore of Conquest” gives an evocative account of the infamous characters and the oral traditions of the frontier period in American history, progressing into the early twentieth century with the continuation of the tradition within the early years of jazz. Turner, however, fails to place Miller centrally within this hypothesis. It is not difficult to see that a connection between the two could be made: Miller would go on to enjoy his countercultural notoriety and the originality of the language and writing style in Tropic of Cancer has been well documented in Katy Masuga's The Secret Violence of Henry Miller (2011). Turner rarely connects the idea of the outlaw directly to Miller, however, observing that it is debatable how much Miller knew of this history at the time of writing Tropic of Cancer. Turner does not use any close readings from Tropic of Cancer or Miller's abundant correspondence to illustrate his notion of the influence of the outlaw upon Miller, and thus the reader is left with very little basis for the central premise of the book.

The book is separated into two parts, essentially pre-Paris and Miller's initial years writing Tropic of Cancer in Paris, which help build the chronological framework that Turner is employing; however, this framework inhibits our understanding of the work. By employing such a rigid, structured reading, Turner is ignoring one of the most revolutionary aspects of the novel: the disordered timeline and overlaying of narratives provide a palimpsest through which the reader is asked to understand the intersecting levels of Miller's consciousness. To ignore this is to place Tropic of Cancer squarely as a confessional memoir, instead of the complex, many-faceted novel it is.

The strength of Renegade is in the confidence with which it deals with Miller's personal life. Turner obviously has a wide knowledge of the biographical minutiae of Miller's life and the period in question. He places Miller firmly within the avant-garde tradition of Paris in the 1930s, whilst showing how Miller continued to live on the outside, never quite entering the inner circle of the literary scene, and providing another example of Miller's outsider status.

Renegade is a well-written introduction to Henry Miller's life until the mid-1930s, ably laying out the life experiences that influenced Miller's writing for the rest of his life, and it asks some interesting questions regarding Miller's place in countercultural America. However, the failure to really connect with these questions or to make use of any other critical reading of Tropic of Cancer makes this more of an autobiography of Miller than an examination of the creation of Tropic of Cancer.