American science fiction writer, famous for his ironic post-apocalyptic dystopia A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), which received in 1961 the Hugo Award. It was the only novel Walter Miller Jr. published in his lifetime. His second novel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, appeared posthumously in 1997. They both reflect Miller's religious concerns and his pessimistic Spenglerian vision of humankind, in which cultures go through a life cycle of birth and decay.

It was said that God, in order to test mankind which had become swelled with pride as in the time of Noah, had commanded the wise men of that age, among them the Blessed Leibowitz, to devise great engines of war such as had never before been upon the Earth, weapons of such might that they contained the very fires of Hell, and that God had suffered these magi to place these weapons in the hands of princes, and to say each prince: "Only because the enemies have such a thing have we devised this for thee, in order that they may know that thou hast it also, and fear to strike. See to it, m'Lord, that thou fearest them as much as they shall now fear thee, that none may unleash this dread thing which we have wrought." (from A Canticle for Leibowitz: A Novel by Walter M. Miller, Jr., New York: Bantam Books, 1997, p. 51)

Walter M. Miller, Jr. was born in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, the only child of Ruth and Walter Miller, who worked for the Florida East Coast Railway. He grew up in the American South and studied at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville from 1940 to 1942. A month after Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Army Air Force, and spent most of the World War II as a radioman and tail gunner aboard B-25 bombers.

Miller flew 53 bombing missions over Italy and the Balkans. He participated,  among others, in the destruction of the Benedictine Abbey at Monte Cassino, the oldest monastery in the Western world. It was also a strategic position in the German's defensive line, but the monks later told that the Germans made no military use of the monastery itself.  "As soon as the decision was made to attack the Monte Cassino feature direct," wrote General F.S. Tucker after the war, "the monastery was doomed to destruction." (Monte Cassino: The Story of the Most Controversial Battle of World War II by David Hapgood and David Richardson, 1984/2002, p. 240)

The controversial assault  is not generally considered a war crime. However, a number of critics believe that the experience had a decisive impact on Miller's personal development and certain recurring themes in his work. The author himself claimed that "[t]he only horror I felt in connection with Monte Cassino was due to the fact that it looked to me as part of my squadron's bomb-pattern might have hit our own troops." (Miller's Milieu, or the Cultural Moments of Late Humanism: Science and Religion in the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Derek J. Thiess, 2008, pp. 19-20) However, Miller talked about the bombing a great deal. His friend, the anthropologist and science fiction writer Chad Oliver has said that the writing of A Canticle for Leibowitz was "a kind of catharsis" for him. (Walter Miller, Jr.: A Reference Guide to His Fiction and His Life by William H. Roberson, McFarland & Company, 2011, p. 114)

At school Miller had called himself an atheist but in 1947, at the age of 25, he converted to Roman Catholicism. Noteworthy, Miller never considered himself a devout Catholic and actually A Canticle for Leibowitz is ambiguous in its attitude toward organized religion – despite the fact that Miller tried to reconcile himself with the Church. New Rome, which is situated in the former United States, has little in common with the old one. Later in life Miller said that his theology lay "somewhere west of Zen and east of the Son". ('Lest the World's Amnesia Be Complete: A Reading of Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz' by Ralph C. Wood, Religion & Literature, Vol. 33, No. 1, Spring, 2001, p. 23)

After the war, Miller married Anna Louise Becker, they had four children. From 1947 to 1950, Miller studied engineering at the University of Texas, Austin, where he enrolled on the G. I. Bill of Rights, and worked part-time in electronics repair. He never finished the degree. Some months before he was to graduate Miller was seriously injured in a car crash, in which he broke both of his legs and his arm and was hospitalized for a long period. To exercise his wrist he began to write. With his family, he moved to Florida in the mid-1950s.

While working on a script for the TV show Captain Video and His Video Rangersi in Manhattan, Miller met the writer Judith Merril, who was married to the science fiction writer Frederik Pohl. At that time Miller and his wife were discussing a trial  separation. Miller lived with Merril in New Jersey and Florida for six months. Once he allegedly confronted Pohl in their little apartment with his deer rifle, which he kept with him all the time. Pohl, a war veteran too, won the ensuing wrestling match according to Merril's memoir – "Finally Fred put Walt down." (Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril by Judith Merril and Emily Pohl-Weary, 2002, p. 131-132) In September 1953, Miller divorced Anna, but remarried her in December. She threatened suicide if he left.

Miller started to write short stories in the 1950s. Before 'Secret of the Death Dome' (Amazing Stories,January 1951), which is in some sources mentioned as his first story, Miller published 'MacDoughal's Wife' (American Mercury, March 1950), a non-science fiction piece, which he wrote while recuperating in a hospital after an automobile accident, and 'Month of Mary' (Extension Magazine, May 1950).

During his active period, Miller wrote about 40 tales, but then went on living in seclusion, avoiding visitors and distancing himself from friends, family, and colleagues. When his wife died in August 1995, Miller was completely heart broken. He had suffered from depression for decades and eventually ended his own life at the age of seventy four. Walter Miller Jr. died of a self inflicted gun shot wound on January 9, 1996 in Daytona Beach, Florida. Before his death, he had started to work on a sequel to Canticle. This disillusioned novel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, was finished by Terry Bisson.

But what experience and history teach is this—that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone. Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help. It is useless to revert to similar circumstances in the Past. The pallid shades of memory struggle in vain with the life and freedom of the Present. (G.W. Hegel in The Philosophy of History, with prefaces by Charles Hegel and the translator, J. Sibree, revised edition, New York: The Colonial Press, [c1899], p. 6)

Captain Video and His Video Rangers, which Miller wrote with Damon Knight, C.M. Kornbluth and Robert Sheckley, was a children's programme,  for  starring Don Hastings and Al Hodge. Sponsored by Post Cereal, it was shot alive in a small studio Manhattan's Wanamaker Department Store. The show folded in 1955.

In 1955 Miller received the Hugo Award for his novelette 'The Darfsteller' (Astounding Science Fiction, January 1955), in which a theatre has substituted human actors with life-sized dolls, controlled by the Maestro, also a machine. The protagonist is a former actor, now working at the theatre as a janitor. He secretly takes the place of a doll, planning to give his last great performance. Inside this simple story frame Miller probed the question of human creativity and hazards of mass production of art. "Whatever you specialize in, another specialty will either gobble you up, or find a way to replace you. If you get what looks like a secure niche, somebody'll come along and wall you up in it and write your epitaph on it. And the more specialized a society gets, the more dangerous it is for the pure specialist. You think an electronic engineer in any safer than an actor? Or a ditch-digger?" (The Darsteller and Other Stories, London: Gargi Books, 1982, p. 67)

Many of Miller's stories transfigured conventional science fiction themes into examinations of ethical questions, mankind's relation to technology, and progress in history. In 'Cucifixus Etiam' (1953) a Peruvian laborer, working in Mars, finds out that he can never return to Earth, and sacrifices the rest of his life for the future generations. The theme of sacrifice also was central in 'I, dreamer' in which a machine with human organs takes a suicide mission to save a group of rebels.

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Miller's famous novel, was about the long, slow rebuilding of civilization after a nuclear war. The events cover a period from the year 2570, six hundered years after a nuclear holocaust, to the year 3781, when humanity again destroys itself. Miller once said: "It never occurred to me that Canticle was my own personal response to war until I was writing the first version of the scene where Zerchi lies half buried in the rubble. Then a lightbulb came on over my head: "Good God, it this the abbey at Monte Cassino? This rubble looks like south Italy, not Southwest desert. What have I been writing?""(quoted in Apocalupse and Temptation in Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz by Anu Vikajärvi, University of Jyväskylä, Master's Thesis, 2010,  p. 10)

On its surface the work repeated the Cold war fears of nuclear annihilation and the collapse of democratic ideals under totalitarian ideologies. But Miller's epic tale is not a political allegory, but an illustration of the dictum that those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. According to James Berger, the novel sided with the view, "that knowledge and technology lead inevitably toward mass destruction" – the death of Earth "reveals technology in its true nature. (After the End: Representations of Post-apocalypse by James Berger, 1999, p. 8)

A Canticle for Leibowitz is perhaps the greatest after-the-bomb novel, preceded by such works as Shadow on the Heart by Judith Merril (1950) and On the Beach by Nevil Shute (1957), in which civilization is destroyed and the survivors of atomic war must contend with radioactive pollution. The novel was first published as three novellas in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1955, 1956, 1957) and then in a hardcover edition by J.P. Lippincott after some rework. The book received negative reviews in The Nation and The New Yorker, in which Whitney Balliett called Miller "a dull, ashy writer," but was praised, among others, by The New York Times and Catholic Digest, in which Francis B. Thorton  said that "It is impossible, in a short space, to suggest the enormously rich texture of this fantastic book . . . " (Catholic Digest, September 1960)

In the first part, 'Fiat Homo,' set in the second Dark Ages, the savage world is terrorized by beasts, mutants, and robbers. Knowledge is mixed with myths and Catholic monasteries preserve indecipherable remnants of former civilization. Basically, during this period, there is no redemption outside of the Church. At the Abbey of St. Leibowitz monks have copied generations after generations the Memorabilia of Leibowitz, without understanding its meaning. Isaac Leibowitz, a Cisterian  priest, is the founder of AOL (Albertian Order of Leibowitz). He is considered a saint but ironically its is revealed to the readers that originally he was a Jewish physicist and his cherished texts are grocery lists, a lottery ticket and drawings of electrical control systems. And there are hints that Leibowitz was involved in a Top Secret government project. Brother Francis, a young monk, finds a technical drawing, which is included in Leibowitz's relics and dies violently fifteen years later for a blueprint initialled by the Blessed Leibowitz.

The second part, 'Fiat Lux,' takes the reader to another period which has much similarities with the Renaissance. Science is breaking free from the chains of religion, electricity is reinvented. The dawn of a new era is embodied in the self-assured scientist Thon Taddeo. Dom Paolo, an old and gentle Abbot, doubts the blessings of the new technological inventions and tries to keep his faith in. In the last part, 'Fiat Voluntas Tua,' the world is again drifting into a global crisis a nuclear war. The Order of Leibowitz has lost its power but prepares a spaceship to escape the second holocaust. A group of clergy and children leave the Earth and the old Church, to start their life again in Alpha Centauri. The legend of the Wandering Jew is taken up in the character of Benjamin, who appears in all in all three parts of the story. 

In A Canticle for Leibowitz Miller posed the basic question of post-apocalypse fiction: "Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no chance but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall?" (Ibid., p. 217) In the mythology Phoenix is a symbol of destruction and re-creation. But in the Christian world, Phoenix also suggests the triumph of eternal life over death - the bird is a proof that the Resurrection is possible. Along with James Blish's A Case of Conscience (1958), Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strage Land (1961), and Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man (1969) Miller's work belongs to the few SF novels of the 1950s and 1960s, which tackled religious questions in fresh way.

Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman was not a direct sequel to Canticle, although it dealt with many of its issues. The protagonist is a monk named Blacktooth St. George, who must choose between his devotion to the Church and the nomadic goddess, the Wild Horse Woman. He becomes secretary to the ambitious Cardinal Brownpony and finds out the Brownpony plans a Crusade against the Texmark empire. Brownpony is elected pope and the disillusioned Blacktooth is marching as a soldier in the Crusade.

For further reading: 'The Crux of Religious Belief: Walter Miller Jr.’s ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz' by Kevin Spinale, in America The Jesuit Review, (June 11, 2021); A Study Guide for Walter M. Miller Jr.'s "A Canticle For Leibowitz" by Cengage Learning Gale (July 25, 2017); Classical Traditions in Science Fiction, edited by Brett M. Rogers and Benjamin Eldon Stevens (2015); 'Captain Video and his Science Fiction Authors' by Andrew Liptak, Kirkus Review (February 12, 2015); Walter M. Miller, Jr.: A Reference Guide to His Fiction and His Life by William H. Roberson (2011); Apocalupse and Temptation in Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz by Anu Vikajärvi (Master's Thesis, 2010); Miller's Milieu, or the Cultural Moments of Late Humanism: Science and Religion in the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Derek J. Thiess (dissertation; 2008); Glorificemus: A Study of the Fiction of Walter M. Miller, Jr., by Rose Secrest (2002); 'Lest the World's Amnesia Be Complete: A Reading of Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz' by Ralph C. Wood, Religion & Literature, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring, 2001); Walter M. Miller, Jr.: A Bio-Bibliography by William H. Roberson and Robert L. Battenfeld (1992); 'The Lost Canticles of Walter M. Miller, Jr.' by David N. Samuelson, in Science Fiction Studies 8, Volume 3, Part 1 (March 1976); Science Fiction: History-Science-Vision by R. Scholes and Eric Rabkin (1977); Visions of Tomorrow: Six Journeys from Outer to Inner Space by David N. Samuelson (1975)

Selected works:

• 'Command Performance', 1952 (short story)
  - film adaptation: in On the Edge, TV film 2001, prod. Chanticleer Films, Paramount Network Television Productions, Paramount Pictures, dir. Anne Heche, starring Andie MacDowell, Paul Rudd, Joey Lauren Adams, Alan Rosenberg, Joel Grey
• A Canticle for Leibowitz, 1959
  - Viimeinen kiitoshymni (suom. Martti Montonen, 1962)
• Conditionally Human, 1962
• The View from the Stars, 1965
• The Science Fiction Stories of Walter M. Miller, Jr., 1978
• The Best of Walter M. Miller, Jr., 1980
• The Darsteller and Other Stories, 1982
  
• Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, 1997 (completed by Terry Bisson)
• The Best of Walter M. Miller, Jr, 2000
• Beyond Armageddon, 2006 (edited by Walter M. Miller, Jr. and Martin H. Greenberg; postscript to the introduction by Martin H. Greenberg)
  
• It Takes a Thief, 2021 (Positronic Publishing; short story, originally published in If Worlds of Science Fiction, May 1952)