Perry Miller

Perry Miller was an American intellectual historian and Harvard University professor. He was an authority on American Puritanism, and one of the founders of what came to be known as 'American Studies'. 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.At Harvard, he directed numerous PhD dissertations; among his most notable students were historians Bernard Bailyn and Edmund Morgan. Margaret Atwood dedicated her famous book The Handmaid's Tale to Perry Miller. He had been a mentor to her at Harvard.His major works included:• (1933) Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630-1650• (1939) The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century• (1949) Jonathan Edwards• (1953) The New England Mind: From Colony to Province• (1953) Roger Williams: His Contribution to the American Tradition• (1956) Errand into the Wilderness• (1956) The American Puritans [editor]• (1957) The American Transcendentalists, their Prose and Poetry• (1957) The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville and the New York Literary Scene• (1958) Consciousness in Concord: The Text of Thoreau’s Hitherto “Lost Journal”• (1961) The Legal Mind in America: from Independence to the Civil War• (1965) The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War