Joseph Hillis Miller was born in Newport News, Virginia, and was raised in upstate New York, the son of Nell Critzer Miller and Joseph Hillis Miller, the president of Keuka College from 1935 to 1941. Miller says of his background, in an interview with Robert Moynihan:

I'm from an American Protestant family.... My grandfather Critzer taught Men's Bible School on Sundays in a country Presbyterian church. He knew the Bible inside and out--better than my father did, though my father was a Baptist minister.... Although I'm not a very faithful inheritor of that tradition, it makes for a difference--my rural and Protestant background.

I've thought about why someone being that kind of American would have been attracted by, let's say, Derrida. I think I have an answer. There is a similarity between a certain aspect of American Protestantism, or even Protestantism generally, and the Jewish tradition, or the Jewish, intellectual...