Perry Miller (1905-1963) was the most famous interpreter of the meaning of the New England Puritanism of the 17th century.

Perry Miller was born in Chicago in 1905, received his formal undergraduate and graduate education at the University of Chicago in the 1920s, and joined the Harvard University faculty in 1931, where he taught in the English Department until his death in 1963.

Miller was the most influential figure in a scholarly movement during the 1920s and 1930s which reinterpreted 17th-century New England Puritanism. The dominant image of the Puritan had been that of a narrow-minded bigot, a reactionary kill-joy whose legacy to American history was sexual repression, alcohol prohibition, and hypocrisy. Several scholars between the two world wars published research which replaced that image with a more complex, balanced, and sympathetic one. Perry Miller's articles and books analyzed Puritan ideas in unprecedented depth.

The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century...