Paris was the making of Henry Miller, transforming an unknown and scarcely published “Brooklyn boy” into a champion of the literary avant-garde, praised by writers as diverse as Blaise Cendrars, T.S. Eliot, and George Orwell. Miller wrote and published three of his major works during his Paris years (1930–1939): Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936), and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). The chapter focuses on Miller’s early period in Paris, vividly portrayed in his stylistically innovative fictional autobiography Tropic of Cancer. Addressing a deficit in existing accounts of Miller’s existential and artistic struggles, which tend to figure the white, male, heterosexual Miller as a universal artist within an unmarked White Euro-American literary tradition, the chapter highlights the overlooked significance of race, racism, and Black cultural and expressive practices in Miller’s self-fashioning and writing aesthetic. Indeed, Miller himself provides a strong incentive for such an approach when, echoing Arthur Rimbaud, he unabashedly refers to Tropic of Cancer as “my nigger book.” The chapter argues that Miller’s much vaunted authenticity, his modernist primitivism, his subversive use of obscenity, as well as his personal philosophy of laughter can be discussed productively through critical discourses on race and with reference to the concept of minstrelsy.