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One of the enigmas of contemporary fiction, Walter Michael Miller, Jr., lives in carefully guarded privacy, an author/recluse as intriguing as J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. But no author refines himself entirely out of existence. His work must reveal...

A man describes his association with Miller, who wrote a bestseller in 1959 about a post-nuclear holocaust and the Catholic Church. Miller committed suicide in Jan 1996. Walt Miller shot himself in January. His suicide followed by several months the death of his...

Walter M. Miller Jr. New York: Bantam Books, 1997 434 pp., $23.95 It has been nearly forty years since Walter M. Miller Jr. peered into his crystal ball and described his vision of a post-technological world peopled with the pitiful survivors of...

A curious book, which defies narrow categories, [A Canticle for Leibowitz] contains elements of satire, science-fiction, fantasy, humor, sectarian religious propaganda, and an apocalyptic "utopian" vision. Although much of its meaning can be discerned by any perceptive reader, it can be better understood with a few footnotes which place it in the context of recent "Catholic" writing. (pp. 213-14) Because characterization in satire does not present a particular person so much as i...

Up until [the publication of A Canticle for Leibowitz] Miller had been regarded, in Sam Moskowitz's words, as "the perennially promising author." An engineer-turned-writer, he had published some forty-odd stories in the major science fiction magazines in the Fifties; several were chosen for anthologies, sometimes of the best stories in the field, but many of his tales are rather conventional and far from distinguished. "The Darfsteller," a story about a human actor struggl...

Critics and reviewers have busied themselves in listing the various themes which lend substance and depth to [A Canticle for Leibowitz]. Stanley J. Rowland (The Christian Century, May 1960) [see excerpt above] has noted the thematic treatment of the issue of euthanasia and of the conflict between church (spiritual) and state (temporal) authority. Edward Ducharme (English Journal, November 1966) [see excerpt above] has claimed that "Miller's narrative continually returns to the conflicts betwee...