Perry (Gilbert Eddy) Miller Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Perry (Gilbert Eddy) Miller

Perry Gilbert Eddy Miller's lifelong account of what he called "the New England mind" established an intellectual paradigm that still dominates the field of colonial history a half-century after the appearance of his first major work in 1933, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630-1650: A Genetic Study. A year after Miller's death in 1963, the prominent historian Edmund Morgan described the work of his former teacher in an essay for the American Antiquarian Society's Proceedings (1964), and the thesis of his "Perry Miller and the Historians" was simple: Miller's work is "the most imaginative and the most exhaustive piece of intellectual history that America has produced," and alongside Samuel Eliot Morison's books on the early years of Harvard, the six books and more than fifty essays Miller wrote during his academic career rank as "the outstanding achievement of the present century in Early American history." From the publication of his enormously influential The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century in 1939 through the posthumous edition of The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (1965), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966, Miller presided over most literary and historical research into the early forms of American culture, both as an influential teacher at Harvard University from 1931 to 1963 and as the prolific author of long and detailed expositions of American intellectual life during the first 200 years of settlement.

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