Perry Gilbert Eddy Miller was born and raised in Chicago, received his undergraduate and graduate education at the University of Chicago, taught for his entire academic career at Harvard University, and produced at least six major books, three volumes of essays, and sixteen volumes of edited texts. Yet this academic vita scarcely does justice to Miller's explosive impact on scholarship and ideas. By training and academic appointment he was a student of literature, yet his greatest influence was on the interpretation of history. An agnostic, he took Calvinist theology more seriously than any American intellectual since Jonathan Edwards. An earthy, profane, hard-drinking, immensely convivial figure, he reserved his most passionate energies for textual analysis. One of his Harvard colleagues noted that, because of his parents' New England roots, "all through the years when Miller was growing up he thought of himself as a transplanted Yankee who would never...