Perry Miller on Melville, and Walter J. Ong's Thought

Abstract

In my 4,200-word review essay "Perry Miller on Melville, and Walter J. Ong's Thought," I highlight what Harvard's Americanist Perry Miller (1905-1963) says about the American novelist and short story writer Herman Melville (1819-1891) in two of his books: (1) The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (1956); and (2) The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War: Books One Through Three, edited by Elizabeth W. Miller (1965). Perry Miller served as the director of the American Jesuit Walter J. Ong's massively researched Harvard doctoral dissertation about the history of the verbal arts (grammar, rhetoric, and logic or dialectic) up to and beyond the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572).