The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville

by Perry Miller

A social, cultural, and literary history of the New York literary scene between 1833 and 1857, The Raven and the Whale focuses on the long and acrimonious battle between the conservative Lewis Gaylord Clark, the editor of the influential Knickerbocker, and his camp, and the democratic Evert Duyckinck, a Wiley and Putnam editor who commissioned works by both Poe and Melville, and the "Young America" over the direction that American literature should take.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, American History, Literary Criticism

370 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1955

About the author

Perry Gilbert Eddy Miller was an intellectual historian and Harvard University professor. He was an authority on American Puritanism, and one of the founders of what came to be known as 'American Studies'. Alfred Kazin once referred to him as "the master of American intellectual history."

In his most famous book, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939), Miller adopted a cultural approach to illuminate the worldview of the Puritans, unlike previous historians who employed psychological and economic explanations of their beliefs and behavior.

At Harvard, he directed numerous PhD dissertations; among his most notable students were historians Bernard Bailyn and Edmund Morgan. Margaret Atwood dedicated her famous book The Handmaid's Tale to Perry Miller. He had been a mentor to her at Harvard.

His major works included:

• (1933) Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630-1650
• (1939) The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century
• (1949) Jonathan Edwards
• (1953) The New England Mind: From Colony to Province
• (1953) Roger Williams: His Contribution to the American Tradition
• (1956) Errand into the Wilderness
• (1956) The American Puritans [editor]
• (1957) The American Transcendentalists, their Prose and Poetry
• (1957) The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville and the New York Literary Scene
• (1958) Consciousness in Concord: The Text of Thoreau’s Hitherto “Lost Journal”
• (1961) The Legal Mind in America: from Independence to the Civil War
• (1965) The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

By turns captivating and tedious. Also, Miller is an idiosyncratic thinker, and it's hard to figure out sometimes how he reaches the conclusions he reaches about his characters. But if you want to understand the literary scene in New York in the 1840s and 1850s, you really need to read this book.

[Humphrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an incredibly well researched and very lively account of the New York literary scene of the 1840s and 1850s; definitely a must-read for anyone who enjoys mid century American literature and wants to get an intimate feel for what the literary scene was like.