This year marks the 80th anniversary of two scandalous books: Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller and the first English edition of Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (originally published in France in 1932). Featuring rowdy descriptions of sex and profanity – mainly in Paris during the late 1920s and early 30s – these novels outraged readers and set new literary precedents. Both books were semi-autobiographical first-person anti-narratives: their authors' use of slang and surreal imagery were at odds with the popular realist style of the period, and notoriety soon beckoned.

Overnight, Céline became a celebrity, receiving a nomination for the prestigious Prix Goncourt. Elsewhere, George Orwell heralded Miller as "the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past". But despite their initial acclaim, Tropic and Journey have had more influence on other writers than mainstream audiences. Today, you're more likely to find Tropic hidden in the erotic book section of many bookshops, and only small independent publishers have ever dared to print Journey in Britain. Why?

Partially because of the controversy that surrounds these authors and their books. Tropic was banned until 1961 in the US for its "obscene" content; in the UK it faced similar prohibition until the same decade. This made it an underground classic but also prevented it from gaining wider readership. That his prose is occasionally overwrought and misogynistic has also not helped Miller's reputation. Consider the following passage: "O Tania, where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed." The transgressive tone is seemingly borrowed from Rimbaud, the French poet whom Miller admired so much he published a book-length study of his verse, and the pornographic element of such descriptions was undoubtedly the result of Miller's second career writing sex novels to make ends meet.

When Miller arrived in Paris from his native New York in 1930, he was poor, middle–aged, yet determined to become an artist. He lived hand-to-mouth during these years, doing anything to get by, including entering into relationships with women who provided him with shelter and money, mostly notably Anaïs Nin, who wrote a book about their affair and funded the first edition of Tropic. Miller's debut novel gives a frank account of this period, yet with the characteristic enthusiasm of a new writer desperate to appear literary. The book is peppered with philosophical asides, poetic outbursts and graphic sexual details, devices pioneered by his hero Rimbaud, whom Miller is often merely mimicking. Tropic is not Miller's finest book, but nonetheless an important introduction to his innovative literary vision.

Comparatively, Journey has aged better. Detailing the fortunes of "Ferdinand Bardamu" as he survives the first world and travels to Africa and America before becoming a doctor in Paris (like its author), Journey is exceptional because of Céline's talent for black humour. "When the grave lies open before us, let's not try to be witty," he says, reflecting on his experience in the trenches. "But on the other hand, let's not forget, but make it our business to record the worst of human viciousness we've seen without changing one word. When that's done, we can curl up our toes and sink into the pit."

Such sentiment won him praise from left-wing figures including Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir; he was even invited to tour the USSR, which he declined. However, in 1937 he published the first of three anti-Semitic pamphlets and during the second world war he served as a physician under Nazi occupation. After the war, he was lucky to escape the firing squad, and although he published many more books, his reputation still remains divisive. Given his later fascist ties, it's difficult to find quite so much enjoyment in Céline's frequently misanthropic observations, yet writers still cite both him and Miller as sources of inspiration. In an essay entitled Writers Lost in the Distance, the late Chilean author Roberto Bolaño praised Miller's work and lamented his slide into literary oblivion. Celine has also been celebrated by writers including Will Self, Irvine Welsh, Tom McCarthy and William T Vollmann.

Elsewhere, their itinerant lifestyles hugely impressed the Beats in the 1950s, and William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg visited Céline in Paris in 1958. In an early short story called Entropy, Thomas Pynchon tipped his hat to Miller by opening with a quote from Tropic. Samuel Beckett also paid tribute to the American's debut, calling it "a momentous event in the history of modern writing". Indeed, the ambiguously autobiographical novel, which Miller and Céline championed, has also seen resurgence in modern literature through the work of WG Sebald, Enrique Vila-Matas, Paul Auster and Iain Sinclair. So why have these two authors been lionised to such degree?

The answer seems to be the result of the premium Miller and Céline placed on the role of language in our understanding of the world. What their highly personal works suggest is that the experience of both life and fiction can only be expressed through words, and that as such, the two share the same intellectual space; a philosophical idea that Proust and Thomas de Quincey arguably first introduced to literature. But whereas Proust romanticised this very human experience and De Quincey sought truth in his dreamlike opium visions, Miller and Céline presented this blurring of the distinction between fact and fiction as a nightmare, hence the ultimately nihilistic visions of both Tropic and Journey. However, in doing so they also pioneered a new concept of the novel; one written in caustic language, that abandoned the structure of the realist novel that James Joyce had begun demolishing in Ulysses. This is reason enough to revisit these old, uneven masterpieces.