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...

Although the biographical information available on Miller is sketchy, his personal experiences and the ambience of the decade in which he wrote are discernible in his fiction. His Southern origins, his wartime flying, his engineering education, his reading of history and anthropology, and his personal vision of his religion are all reflected in some of his stories. How his more private life might be involved is conjectural, but the social environment of America in the years following World War II is eminent...