He wanted to be Ernest Hemingway, to go where the action was. The second was that he hated to be thought of as bookish. Morgan recalls: "The first was that he was brilliant, the smartest person I've ever known. "There are at least two things you have to keep in mind about Perry," his former student Edmund S.
#Perry miller errand into the wilderness professional#
While Miller is largely remembered for his still influential scholarship on Puritan thought and theology, he in fact struggled for much of his professional life with Emerson's call for intellectual activism as well as with the contradictions engendered by that call. It is fitting that Perry Miller struggled with the problem that continues to vex the discipline he helped bring into being. political intervention" (43), Lawrence Buell writes, the verdict is still out on how precisely to harness the often baffling, if symbiotic, relationship between the social, cultural, and political realms. While Emerson may continue to challenge readers to imagine "precisely how intellectual work constitute. The question of how intellectuals-most of whom now reside in the academy-may best effect social change persists with unabated urgency in our present moment as David Farber notes, "democratic publics and purveyors of elite knowledge are not and, virtually by definition, should not be easily mated" (794). The problem dates back at least as far as "The American Scholar," in which Emerson challenged the self-conception of his Harvard audience by suggesting that "he scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant" (70) and then proposed a relationship, tenuously formulated, between intellectual work and social activism. American Literary History 18.1 (2006) 102-128įew topics in American studies have proved so irresolvable as that of the public intellectual.
(1965) The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War. (1961) The Legal Mind in America: from Independence to the Civil War. 
(1958) Consciousness in Concord: The Text of Thoreau’s Hitherto “Lost Journal”. (1957) The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville and the New York Literary Scene. (1957) The American Transcendentalists, their Prose and Poetry. (1953) Roger Williams: His Contribution to the American Tradition. (1953) The New England Mind: From Colony to Province. (1939) The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Margaret Atwood dedicated her famous book The Handmaid's Tale to Perry Miller. In his most famous book, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939), Miller adopted a cultural approach to illuminate the worldview of the Puritans, unlike previous historians who employed psychological and economic explanations of their beliefs and behavior.Īt Harvard, he directed numerous PhD dissertations among his most notable students were historians Bernard Bailyn and Edmund Morgan. Alfred Kazin once referred to him as "the master of American intellectual history." He was an authority on American Puritanism, and one of the founders of what came to be known as 'American Studies'. Margaret Atwood dedicated her famous book The Handmaid's Tale Perry Miller was an American intellectual historian and Harvard University professor. At Harvard, he directed numerous PhD dissertations among his most notable students were historians Bernard Bailyn and Edmund Morgan. Alfred Kazin once referred to him as "the master of American intellectual history." In his most famous book, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939), Miller adopted a cultural approach to illuminate the worldview of the Puritans, unlike previous historians who employed psychological and economic explanations of their beliefs and behavior. Perry Miller was an American intellectual historian and Harvard University professor.
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