Perry Miller – författare

Perry Miller's classic one-volume anthology of Puritan writings recreates the world of seventeenth-century New England through a judicious selection of tracts, journals, sermons, and poetry by the major Puritan writers: William Bradford, Cotton Mather, John Winthrop, Thomas Hooker, Anne Bradstreet, Michael Wigglesworth, and Edward Taylor among them.

The title of this book by Perry Miller, who is world-famous as an interpreter of the American past, comes close to posing the question it has been Mr. Miller's lifelong purpose to answer: What was the underlying aim of the first colonists in coming to America? In what light did they see themselves? As men and women undertaking a mission that was its own cause and justification? Or did they consider themselves errand boys for a higher power which might, as is frequently the habit of authority, change its mind about the importance of their job before they had completed it?These questions are by no means frivolous. They go to the roots of seventeenth-century thought and of the ever-widening and quickening flow of events since then. Disguised from twentieth-century readers first by the New Testament language and thought of the Puritans and later by the complacent transcendentalist belief in the oversoul, the related problems of purpose and reason-for-being have been central to the American experience from the very beginning. Mr. Miller makes this abundantly clear and real, and in doing so allows the reader to conclude that, whatever else America might have become, it could never have developed into a society that took itself for granted.The title, Errand into the Wilderness, is taken from the title of a Massachusetts election sermon of 1670. Like so many jeremiads of its time, this sermon appeared to be addressed to the sinful and unregenerate whom God was about to destroy. But the original speaker's underlying concern was with the fateful ambiguity in the word errand. Whose errand?This crucial uncertainty of the age is the starting point of Mr. Miller's engrossing account of what happened to the European mind when, in spite of itself, it began to become something other than European. For the second generation in America discovered that their heroic parents had, in fact, been sent on a fool's errand, the bitterest kind of all; that the dream of a model society to be built in purity by the elect in the new continent was now a dream that meant nothing more to Europe. The emigrants were on their own. Thus left alone with America, who were they? And what were they to do?In this book, as in all his work, the author of The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century; The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, and The Transcendentalists, emphasizes the need for understanding the human sources from which the American mainstream has risen. In this integrated series of brilliant and witty essays which he describes as "pieces," Perry Miller invites and stimulates in the reader a new conception of his own inheritance.

The New England Mind: From Colony to Province is one of Perry Miller’s masterworks, exploring the intellectual history of the Puritans through a deep investigation of the thought of the Puritan divines. In this book, as well as its predecessor The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, Miller asserts a single intellectual history for America that could be traced to the Puritan belief system.

In The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, as well as successor The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, Perry Miller asserts a single intellectual history for America that could be traced to the Puritan belief system.

The late Perry Miller once stated, "I have been compelled to insist that the mind of man is the basic factor in human history," and his study of the mind in America has shaped the thought of three decades of scholars. The fifteen essays here collected-several of them previously unpublished-address themselves to the facets of the American consciousness and to their expression in literature from the time of the Cambridge Agreement to the Nobel Prize acceptance speeches of Hemingway and Faulkner. A companion volume to Errand into the Wilderness, its general theme is one adumbrated in Miller's two-volume masterpiece, The New England Mind-the thrust of civilization into the vast, empty continent and its effect upon Americans' concept of themselves as "nature's nation."The essays first concentrate on Puritan covenant theology and its gradual adaptation to changing condition in America: the decline in zeal for a "Bible commonwealth," the growth of trade and industry, and the necessity for coexisting with large masses of unchurched people. As the book progresses, the emphasis shifts from religion to the philosophy of nature to the development of an original literature, although Miller is usually analyzing simultaneously all three aspects of the American quest for self-identity. In the final essays, he shows how the forces that molded the self-conscious articulateness of the early New Englanders still operate in the work of contemporary American writers.

In 1928, as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I unaccountably found John Winthrop’s Journal exerting upon me a baneful spell. I resisted manfully, as long as I could, but Governor Winthrop irresistibly lured me to the brink of commitment, and so I threw myself from the precipice of twentieth-century prejudice into the maelstrom of his epoch.One of my most revered instructors tried to prevent me. This, he said, was an ignis fatuus. All the hay of New England Puritanism had been threshed. I would wreck my career, even before it commenced, crawling through the dry stubble hoping to pick up stray gleanings.His counsel was generous and, furthermore, seemed at that time the soul of prudence. Some perversity of temper would not let me yield. Another beloved teacher, Percy Holmes Boynton, encouraged me to risk the try. Without him, I would have faltered. As I now look back on that academic drama, I realize that he was working on the principle which always made his tuition exciting: namely, that a student should be given enough rope to hang himself, if this he was resolved to do. Wherefore I dedicated the book to him. Wherefore I have endeavored to accord the same privilege to my own students.