Walter Michael Miller, Jr. was born on January 23, 1923, in New Smyrna Beach, Florida.
After studying at the University of Tennessee, Walter Miller Jr. served in the American Army Air Corps during World War II. With the role of radioman and tail gunner, he participated in over fifty missions, including the bombing of the Benedictine abbey of Montecassino. For him, this was a very traumatic experience that influenced him for the rest of his life. At the end of the war, he finished his studies at the University of Texas.
In 1945, Walter Miller, Jr. married Anna Louise Becker, with whom he had four children. His career as a science fiction writer was short and intense, like his stories. He was essentially a writer of short fiction and published a little more than forty short stories, novelettes, and novellas. His first short story, “Secret of the Death Dome”, was published in 1951.
In 1953, Walter Miller Jr. also worked for television, writing scripts for the TV show “Captain Video and His Video Rangers”, the first science fiction TV show. The novelette “The Darfsteller”, the story of a stage actor at a time when robots act out plays instead of human beings, won the Hugo Award in 1955.
In 1959, Walter Miller, Jr. published “A Canticle for Leibowitz”, a masterpiece obtained by fixing-up three stories heavily revised and expanded. The novel that resulted won the Hugo Award. It’s one of the greatest novels of the post-atomic and post-apocalyptic in general genres that tells the cycle of new development that takes place in the course of the centuries that follow a nuclear war. It’s also cited as one of the most important religious science fiction novels because it’s centered around the monks of the Abbey of St. Leibowitz.
As if he had finished the inspiration, Walter Miller Jr. retired as a writer and started working as an engineer. Only a few decades later, he started writing a new novel set in the same fictional universe as “A Canticle for Leibowitz”. Unfortunately, in the last years of his life, the author suffered from depression and retired to live almost as a hermit. His wife’s death in 1995 was a terrible blow for him, and on January 9, 1996, he committed suicide.
The only real novel by Walter Miller Jr., as it was intended as such from the beginning, “Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman“, was completed by Terry Bisson and published in 1997. It’s the last legacy left by a writer extraordinary and absolutely unique.
