Background
Perry Gilbert Eddy Miller was born on February 25, 1905, in Chicago, Illinois. He was the son of Eben Perry Sturgis Miller, a physician, and of Gertrude Eddy. He grew up in Chicago and spent several summers of his youth in Vermont.
Perry Gilbert Eddy Miller was born on February 25, 1905, in Chicago, Illinois. He was the son of Eben Perry Sturgis Miller, a physician, and of Gertrude Eddy. He grew up in Chicago and spent several summers of his youth in Vermont.
Miller attended the Tilton School and Austin High School in Chicago, and in 1922 enrolled at the University of Chicago. In 1926, he resumed his studies at the University of Chicago, where he received the bachelor's degree in 1928 and the doctorate in 1931. In 1933, with F. O. Matthiessen and Ellery Sedgwick, Miller began a survey course in American literature, one of the early courses in the field at an American university. Other innovative courses followed, including one on American romanticism that made Miller's reputation as one of Harvard's great teachers.
In 1923, Miller left the university to try his hand at other things. He first went to Colorado, next to New York City, and then abroad. It is not clear now and it probably was not to him at the time just what he was seeking in these travels. The theater drew his attention in New York, and for a time he played bit parts in Paterson, New Jersey. He also performed around New York City with Edward H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe's Shakespeare company. The stage did not hold Miller for long, and he next took to the sea. His travels, apparently for a time as a seaman, took him to Tampico, Mexico, the Mediterranean, and then to Africa, where he left his ship to work for an oil company in the Belgian Congo. There, he later wrote, he felt the calling to expound what he took to be "the innermost propulsion of the United States. " Miller may have felt his first inspiration to study America while unloading drums of case oil in Africa, but his experience in graduate school gave this impulse direction and shape. Several of his teachers attempted to discourage his interest in the American Puritans, which had been stimulated by a reading of John Winthrop's Journal and by the conviction that he should begin at the beginning. At least one professor, Percy Holmes Boynton, did not discourage him. In fact, he encouraged Miller to spend the academic year 1930-1931 at Harvard, where Miller took courses with two masters in the field, Kenneth Murdock and Samuel Eliot Morison. Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, Miller's doctoral dissertation, was published in 1933. He had begun teaching two years earlier, as a tutor at Harvard's Leverett House. During the years before World War II, Miller completed the research for The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939). The war interrupted his studies, he joined the U. S. Army in 1942, serving first as a captain and then in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) as a major until his discharge in 1945. Harvard promoted him to full professor in 1946. In the years following World War II Miller reached the peak of his powers as a scholar and teacher. Miller died in Cambridge, Massachussets.
Miller offered no facile thesis about either Puritanism or America. Nor did he claim to have a method that would answer questions about American history and literature. He was in certain respects an intellectual historian, a literary critic and historian, and a historian of American culture. The history of Puritanism obsessed Miller as a young scholar, and it remained of vital interest to him even after he began the study he did not live to complete, The Life of the Mind in America. His work on Puritanism concentrated on the ideas of the Puritans, who, he argued, had come to America on a great mission the completion of the Protestant Reformation for the instruction of Europe. They would define the character of the true church organization and the nature of a truly holy society.
Miller's students and friends have described him as a brilliant teacher who demanded much from his students. But he gave good students strong encouragement and took their work seriously. He was no cloistered scholar, too involved with his own work to pay attention to the world around him. Rather, he took an active part in the life of the university and studied the affairs of the world eagerly.
Among his interests was the Boston Red Sox baseball team.
On September 12, 1930, Miller married Elizabeth Williams; they had no children.