Walter James Miller

Walter James Miller (January 16, 1918 – June 20, 2010) was an American literary critic, playwright, poet, and translator. The author, co-author, editor and/or translator of more than sixty books, including four landmark annotated translations of novels by Jules Verne, Miller taught at Hofstra University, Polytechnic Institute of New York University, Colorado State University, and for over 40 years at New York University, where he created and taught a popular "Great Books" course. In 1980, he received the NYU Alumni Great Teacher Award. For fifteen years in the 1960s and 1970s, his Peabody Award-winning show Reader's Almanac was a fixture on WNYC, public radio in New York City, and broadcast interviews with many established and rising authors and poets, including Nadine Gordimer, Andrew Glaze, Alan Ginsberg, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (A compilation of Miller's several interviews with Vonnegut was published by Caedmon Audio in 2006.) The author of two published collections of poetry (Making an Angel, 1977, Love's Mainland, 2001), Miller's verse drama Joseph in the Pit was produced off-Broadway in 1993 and 2002.

A pioneering figure of modern Jules Verne studies, Miller's 1965 Washington Square Press edition of Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea included both the first unabridged English translation of the novel and the first scholarly discussion of what he termed the problem of "the two Jules Vernes." European readers, Miller observed,

admire Verne for his attention to scientific method, his concern for technical accuracy, his ability to work wonders with authentic facts and figures.

But American readers have the impression that Verne is somewhat casual with basic data and arithmetic, even with the details of plot and character. Condescendingly, they think of the Voyages Extraordinary as "children's books." American science-fiction writers have clobbered Verne for his "vagueness" and for the "gaps" in his technical explanations.

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