5 Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness

Abstract

Abstract This chapter traces the process by which Perry Miller came to view Emerson as the molten center in the Ptolemaic universe of American literary history. Accordingly, some of his most important utterances about American culture gather around Emerson and seek to establish a “usable” version of the author as someone who wished above all else to make ideas a force in a world hopelessly immured in an inert materialism. In 1939-40, for instance, as the Harvard campus erupted in a bitterly politicized debate over US intervention in World War II, Miller wrote “From Edwards to Emerson”, a dazzling piece of scholarly synthesis that covertly rebuked campus communists and isolationists while at the same time suggesting the basis for more effective intellectual activism. And as Cold War anxiety coalesced with his own sense that the study of America had been co-opted by an imperial project that in turn led to intellectual constriction and repression, he found himself describing with increasing frequency the Emersonian scholar as a “lone wolf”, an outsider fiercely protective of independent thought while at the same time fated to obscurity, misappropriation, and bitter alienation.