About Perry Miller
Perry Gilbert Eddy Miller (February 25, 1905 – December 9, 1963) was an American intellectual historian and a co-founder of the field of American Studies. Miller specialized in the history of early America and took an active role in a revisionist view of the colonial Puritan theocracy that was cultivated at Harvard University beginning in the 1920s. Heavy drinking led to his premature death at the age of 58. == Early life == Miller was born in Chicago in 1905 to Eben Perry Sturges Miller, a physician from Mansfield, Ohio, and Sarah Gertrude Miller (née Eddy) from Bellows Falls, Vermont. His father appeared in the deacon's candidacy lists for Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in 1895 and 1898, but he also received a "notice of discipline" for "abandonment or forfeiture of the Holy Orders" and "deposition" from the 1898 ministry. The late 19th-century Episcopal Church of Illinois commonly issued notices of discipline for cases of "moral delinquency," "doctrinal errors," and "sickness and infirmity." Perry Miller was born seven years later. Perry Miller left home three months before his eighteenth birthday. Inspired by hearing about the adventures of World War I veterans in Europe, between 1922 and 1926, Miller traveled widely, by his own account working in California lettuce fields, acting on Broadway [Greenwich Village], writing for magazines, and working aboard a freighter ship along the Congo River. In a 1956 preface to the Errand into the Wilderness collection, Perry Miller disclosed that, along the shores of the Congo River, he had decided to pursue the intellectual history of Puritanism. "At Matadi on the banks of the Congo", Miller recounted, "seeking 'adventure' " that he believed World War I veterans had experienced (noting a lack of prescience that "I too should have my own War"), he came to "realize a determination." Miller acknowledged that "the adventures that Africa afforded were tawdry enough, but it became the setting for a sudden epiphany (if the word be not too strong) of the pressing necessity for expounding my America to the twentieth century." Miller compared his situation to that of Edward Gibbon, who sat "disconsolate amid the ruins of the Capitol at Rome" when a similar epiphany thrust upon Gibbon the " 'laborious work' of The Decline and Fall." Thus "it was given to me, equally disconsolate on the edge of a jungle of central Africa, to have thrust upon me the mission of expounding what I took to be the innermost propulsion of the United States, while supervising, in that barbaric tropic, the unloading of drums of case oil flowing out of the inexhaustible wilderness of America." The epiphany "demanded" that he study "the beginning of a beginning.
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