American · 1905–1963
Perry Miller (1905-1963) was an American historian who founded the modern study of Puritan New England and helped establish American Studies as a discipline at Harvard, where he taught from 1931 until his death. He traced his calling to a night spent pumping oil from a tank in the Belgian Congo, where he resolved to explain the American mind on its own terms rather than Europe's. The result was a series of books - Orthodoxy in Massachusetts (1933), Jonathan Edwards (1949), and the two-volume The New England Mind (1939, 1953) - that treated Puritan theology as serious intellectual history rather than a target for Mencken-style mockery, recovering Jonathan Edwards as a major American thinker. His 1956 essay collection Errand into the Wilderness argued that the Puritans' sense of a divine mission survived its own theology, resurfacing generations later as American national myth. His unfinished The Life of the Mind in America won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1966, three years after his death.