Perry Miller

"American capitalism of 1830 to 1860 was a riot of extravagance. Hundreds of those who glistened in New York and Boston in the 1840's are forgotten. A few families—, —managed to maintain continuity, but they were few. The number who went down to ruin invited a chronicler equal to Dickens."

"Later practitioners improved upon Mitchell and Stoughton only by extending the list of sins, by going into greater detail. Year by year the stock enumeration grew, and once a new sin was added to the series it kept its place in subsequent editions."

"By the middle of the twentieth century, the world had accepted Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, published in 1851, as an indubitable masterpiece of the nineteenth, even though that world became aware of it only a generation ago."

"deserves credit for his courageous advocacy of the of Ohio, probably more than for his contributions to literature: his trade monthly, published from 1854 t0 1861, Cozzens' Wine Press, is a neglected classic which provides a charming insight into the amenities of the table in a society which devoted considerable care to that department."

"Perry Miller died fifty years ago today at age fifty-eight. After his death, letters of appreciation from friends and former students flooded the desk where Elizabeth Miller was working to complete her husband’s The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War. In their letters, students expressed gratitude, friends offered Elizabeth their support, and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. confessed that Miller’s death, coming on the heels of , had left him in a deep depression. “Perry, as you well know,” wrote Schlesinger, “was one of the first influences in my life.” “He was a superb teacher,” Schlesinger recalled. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, a frequent correspondent of Miller’s and a careful reader of all Miller’s books, published an obituary for his friend in the '."