Merle Miller

Merle Dale Miller (May 17, 1919 – June 10, 1986) was an American writer, novelist, and author who is perhaps best remembered for his best-selling biography of Harry S. Truman, and as a pioneer in the gay rights movement.

Miller came out of the closet in an article in the New York Times Magazine on January 17, 1971, titled "What It Means to Be a Homosexual". Due The response of over 2,000 letters to the article (more than ever received by that newspaper) led to a book publication later that year. The book was reprinted by Penguin Classics in 2012, with a new foreword by Dan Savage and a new afterword by Charles Kaiser.

Merle Miller was born in Montour, Iowa and raised in Marshalltown, Iowa, attending the University of Iowa and the London School of Economics. Before World War II, he was a Washington correspondent for the late Philadelphia Record. During the war, Miller served both in the Pacific and in Europe as a war correspondent and editor for Yank, The Army Weekly.

Following his discharge from the Army, he was editor of both Harper's and Time magazines. He also worked as a book reviewer for The Saturday Review of Literature and as a contributing editor for The Nation. His work appeared frequently in the New York Times Magazine.

During the course of a writing career that spanned several decades, Miller wrote numerous novels, including the best-selling classic post war novel, That Winter (1948). His other novels are Island 49 (1945); The Sure Thing (1949); Reunion (1954); A Day in Late September (1956); A Secret Understanding (1961); A Gay and Melancholy Sound (1962); and What Happened (1972). He also wrote a novel titled The Warm Feeling, but due to the fact that the publisher did not give him the opportunity to read and edit the manuscript, he publicly disowned the novel and would not have anything to do with it.

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