High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Henry Valentine Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980) was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of `novel` that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional. His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936), and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). He also wrote travel memoirs and essays of literary criticism and analysis.