Yet when he finally settled in New England, he steadfastly retained many qualities that the world thinks of as Chicagoan, including a hearty, informal manner, a lusty humor, a stupendous capacity for hard work, and, above all, a refusal to take the East at its word."
Restless and disappointed to have missed the adventure of World War I, Miller dropped out of the University of Chicago at the end of his freshman year in 1923 and, during three years of nomadic roaming, wandered, first to Colorado; then to the New York City area, where he tried his hand as a Shakespearean actor; and finally to Mexico, the Mediterranean, and the west coast of Africa as a merchant seaman. "At Matadi, on the banks of the Congo," he later recalled, "while supervising in that barbaric tropic, the unloading of drums of case oil flowing out of the inexhaustible wilderness of America," he asked himself what it must have meant for Europeans to enter the American wilderness--as forbidding to them as was the African jungle to Miller--for the first time. So it was that he returned to Chicago in 1926 and over the next four years completed his undergraduate and most of his graduate education.
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