Walter M. Jr Miller (Walter Michael Miller) Biography

American science fiction writer, born in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, educated at the University of Texas. He is best known for A Canticle for Liebowitz (1960); this novel was constructed according to a typical science-fiction practice from magazine stories published earlier. It focuses on the Abbey of Liebowitz somewhere in the deserts of a post-disaster America. Over a Dark Age of 1,200 years the monks preserve something of human culture, until a new barbarism leads to another nuclear war. It was Miller's only novel, and was influential within the genre of science fiction. His short stories written in the 1950s have been collected in Conditionally Human (1962) and The View from the Stars (1965).