Henry Valentine Miller (26 December 1891 – 7 June 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, Tropic of Capricorn and Black Spring.

He also wrote travel memoirs and essays of literary criticism and analysis. Miller was born to tailor Heinrich Miller and Louise Marie Neiting, in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, New York City, of German Catholic heritage. As a child he lived at 662 Driggs Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, known in that time (and referred to frequently in his works) as The Fourteenth Ward.

As a young man, he was active with the Socialist Party (his "quondam idol" was the Black Socialist Hubert Harrison). He briefly - for only one semester - attended the City College of New York. Although he was an exceptional scholar, he could neither be anchored nor submit to the traditional college system of education.

In both 1928 and 1929, he spent several months in Paris with his second wife, June Edith Smith (June Miller) (his first wife was Beatrice Sylvas Wickens, whom he married in 1917). The next year he moved to Paris unaccompanied, and he continued to live there until the outbreak of World War II. He lived an impecunious lifestyle that depended on the benevolence of friends, including Anaïs Nin, who became his lover and financed the first printing of Tropic of Cancer in 1934.

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