Perry Miller

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Cover of Miller's Errand into the Wilderness

Perry G. Miller (February 25, 1905, Chicago USA - December 9, 1963) was an American intellectual historian and Harvard University professor.

Miller earned his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees from the University of Chicago. He taught at Harvard from 1931 until his death. He was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1966 for his unfinished book The Life of the Mind in America. Miller was an authority on American Puritanism. He was regarded by some to be "the master of American intellectual history." (Alfred Kazin) At Harvard, under Miller's tutelage, Bernard Bailyn and Edmund Morgan blossomed into professional historians.

When Marshall McLuhan was teaching at Saint Louis University, he called Miller's The New England Mind (1939) to the attention of Walter J. Ong, a Jesuit seminarian whose master's thesis McLuhan supervised. In an appendix to Miller (1939), Miller wrote that "[t]here is a crying need for a full study of [Peter] Ramus and his influence" (p. 493). A decade later, Ong took up the challenge, writing a doctoral dissertation on Peter Ramus and Ramism at Harvard under Miller's supervision. In 1958, the Harvard University Press published that dissertation in two volumes titled Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (reissued in 2004 by the University of Chicago Press, with a new foreword by Adrian Johns), and Ramus and Talon Inventory.

In the foreword to Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, Ong says, "In the conception and preparation of the present work, my greatest debt of gratitude is to Professor Perry Miller of Harvard University, whose work on Ramism provided the immediate stimulus for the present study and who could always be relied on for enthusiasm and encouragement when the mass of material in which the study is necessarily involved grew occasionally oppressing".

Ong dedicates his 1967 collection of essays entitled In the Human Grain "To the memory of Perry Miller, Cor ad cor loquitur."

[edit] Books by Perry Miller

1933. Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630-1650.
1939. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century.
1949. Jonathan Edwards.
1953. The New England Mind: From Colony to Province.
1956. Errand into the Wilderness.
1957. The American Transcendentalists, their Prose and Poetry.
1957. The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville and the New York Literary Scene.
1958. Consciousness in Concord: The Text of Thoreau’s Hitherto “Lost Journal”.
1961. The Legal Mind in America: from Independence to the Civil War.
1965. Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War.