Volume 5, Number 8 · November 25, 1965
On Perry Miller
By Alfred Kazin
The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War
by Perry Miller
Harcourt, Brace & World, 338 pp., $7.50
Perry Miller liked to tell the story of how he had conceived his lifework as an historian of ideas in America. It all began in Africa, where one day, while on an extended Conradian adventure after graduating from the University of Chicago, he found himself looking after a vast cargo of oil drums from the States, and was so bemused and personally illuminated by the range of American power that he determined to trace its evolution. When he died at fifty-eight in 1963, he had already proved himself such a master of basic and often neglected sources in the intellectual history of American Protestantism over three centuries that his work had taken on something like the grandeur of design associated with the great nineteenth-century historians and system-builders. Beginning at the beginning, he did his doctor's thesis on Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, the conscious first step in his resolve to trace the pattern leading up to the modern colossus; he then went on to publish his astonishingly fresh study of The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, its sequel, From Colony to Province; his remarkable book on Jonathan Edwards, his compilations on Puritanism and Transcendentalism, on the legal mind in America, on social thought between the Civil War and the First World War, on Margaret Fuller. He had moved up to the nineteenth century with The Raven and the Whale, and had already written the two opening sections of his most ambitious book, The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War, when he died.
Review, 1388 words
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