Perry Miller (1905-1963) was an American intellectual historian and Harvard University professor.

Miller was born in Chicago, Illinois on February 25, 1905. He earned his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees from the University of Chicago. He taught at Harvard from 1931 until he had a heart attack and died on December 9, 1963. Miller was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1966 for his work on his unfinished book The Life of the Mind in America. Prior to his death, Miller was an expert in the field of American Puritanism. He was regarded by some to be "the master of American intellectual history." (Alfred Kazin)

When Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was teaching at Saint Louis University and working on his Cambridge University doctoral dissertation on Thomas Nashe and the verbal arts (which he completed in 1943), McLuhan called Miller's The New England Mind (1939) to the attention of the young Jesuit graduate student Walter J. Ong (1912-2003). In an appendix, Miller declares that "is a crying need for a full study of [Peter Ramus and his influence" (493). About a decade later, Ong proceeded to Ph.D. studies in English at Harvard University, where Miller served as the supervisor of his doctoral dissertation on Peter Ramus and Ramism, which was published in two volumes in 1958 by Harvard University Press: Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (reissued in 2004 by the University of Chicago Press, with a new foreword by Adrian Johns) and Ramus and Talon Inventory.

In the foreword to Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, Ong says, "In the conception and preparation of the present work, my greatest debt of gratitude is to Professor Perry Miller of Harvard University, whose work on Ramism provided the immediate stimulus for the present study and who could always be relied on for enthusiasm and encouragement when the mass of material in which the study is necessarily involved grew occasionally oppressing".

Ong dedicates his 1967 collection of essays entitled In the Human Grain "To the memory of Perry Miller, Cor ad cor loquitur."

At Harvard, under Miller's tutelage, Bernard Bailyn and Edmund Morgan blossomed into professional historians.

List of Perry Miller's Writings

• Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630-1650, 1933
• The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, 1939
• Jonathan Edwards, 1949
• The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, 1953
• Errand into the Wilderness, 1956
• The American Transcendentalists, their Prose and Poetry, 1957
• The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville and the New York Literary Scene, 1957
• The Legal Mind in America: from Independence to the Civil War, 1961
• Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War, 1965

Miller also wrote intellectual biographies on Jonathan Edwards (1949) and Roger Williams (1953).

Historians

Perry Miller