Perry G. Miller (February 25, 1905 – December 9, 1963) was an American intellectual historian and Harvard University professor. He was an authority on American Puritanism, and a founder of the field of American Studies[1]. Alfred Kazin referred to him as "the master of American intellectual history".[2] In his most famous book, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939), Miller adopted a cultural approach to illuminate the worldview of the Puritans, unlike previous historians who employed psychological and economic explanations of their beliefs and behavior. He also wrote biographies of Roger Williams and Jonathan Edwards.
Miller was born in Chicago, Illinois. He earned his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees from the University of Chicago and taught at Harvard beginning in 1931. In 1942 Miller resigned his post at Harvard to join the U.S. Army; he was stationed in Great Britain for the duration of the war, where he worked for the Office of Strategic Services. Miller may have been instrumental in creating the Psychological Warfare Branch of the O.S.S.; certainly he worked for the PWB for the duration of the war. (Precisely what he did and how he spent his time has never been disclosed; it may have been regarded in the postwar world by government officials as a matter of national security.)
After 1945 Miller returned to teaching at Harvard. According to legend, Miller returned to the campus housing where he had lived as a young man and used to get roaring drunk on Bloody Marys while working over the galley proofs for The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in 19th Century Manhattan (released by Johns Hopkins).
Miller also wrote book reviews and articles in The Nation and American Scholar. In his long-awaited biography of Jonathan Edwards, published in 1949, Miller argues that Edwards was actually an artist working in the only medium available to him in the 18th century American frontier, namely: that of religion and theology. His posthumously published The Life of the Mind in America, for which he received a Pulitzer Prize, was only the first installment of a projected ten-volume series.
Miller spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey on a Guggenheim Fellowship and also taught in Japan for a year. His death was a tragic loss to America's intellectual landscape. Felix Frankfurter wrote a moving obituary for Miller which was published in The New York Herald Tribune after his death; evidently, this Supreme Court Justice read Miller's work closely. A brief taste of Miller's almost poetic use of prose: "For Christ nets were lowered into the sea and commerce conducted."
Miller set new standards for how to undertake intellectual history in depth, rather than the shallow listings of books and ideas that had been common. Searl (1977) argues that The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century is a search for the underlying meaning of the Puritan experience. As an artist, Miller uses the creative power of an imaginative vision to offer an insight and understanding into the emotional and spiritual reality of Puritan "piety" and ideas. While at times it is difficult to distinguish Miller's narrative voice and the primary source quotations, Miller's attempts to discover and to reveal the religious feelings and the religious ideas set a new standard for intellectual historiography.[3] Miller's work has probably been felt on several generations of historians and intellectuals, from Puritan studies to discussions of narrative theory. The essays in Errand into the Wilderness and Nature's Nation are probably his most accessible writings; they offer piercing insights into the nature of American civilization and political institutions.