Errand into the Wilderness by Perry Miller
Published 1956 · 72,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, History, Nonfiction, Religion & Spirituality
How hard is Errand into the Wilderness to read?
Errand into the Wilderness scores 53 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Miller writes elegant mid-century academic prose layered with Puritan theological vocabulary -- covenant, election, antinomianism, federal theology, declension, jeremiad -- much of it glossed in context but unfamiliar to general readers. It is less obscure than modernist fiction's invented language, closer to the literary-but-accessible register of a book like 2666 with specialized historical terminology stacked on top.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Long, carefully balanced periodic sentences carry multiple qualifying clauses, a style built for the lecture hall rather than casual reading. The syntax rewards patience but never collapses into the unpunctuated extremes of a book like Ulysses.
- Abstraction: 75 out of 100
- The essays work almost entirely in the register of ideas -- the logic of covenant theology, the meaning of a collective 'errand' -- rather than concrete incident. Even a close reading of a specific sermon serves an argument about the shape of a worldview, not a narrative.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- Each essay compresses decades of sermons, doctrinal controversy, and competing historiography into a tightly argued chapter, assuming the reader can hold several theological positions and historical episodes in mind simultaneously.
How Errand into the Wilderness is regarded
Errand into the Wilderness holds a literary regard score of 77 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.