Merle Miller - Life and Career

Life and Career

Merle Miller was born in Montour, Iowa. He grew up in Marshalltown, Iowa, and attended 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 he 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 didn't give him the opportunity to read and edit the manuscript, he publicly disowned the novel and would not have anything to do with it.

His works of non-fiction include We Dropped the A-Bomb (1946), a book he wrote in collaboration with Abe Spitzer, a radioman who was on the bomber, The Great Artiste, one of the three B-29s that dropped the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; The Judges and The Judged (1952); Only You Dick Daring (1964), Miller's scathing account of trying to make a show with CBS for the 1963-1964 television season; and On Being Different. What It Means To Be a Homosexual (1971).

He was a contributor of A Treasury of Great Reporting; The Best of Yank; and Yank: The GI Story of the War.

In 1967 he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest,” vowing to refuse to pay taxes raised to fund the Vietnam War.

Miller wrote many television plays and is the author of the screenplays, "The Rains of Ranchiphur" (1955) with Richard Burton and Lana Turner, and "Kings Go Forth," (1958) with Frank Sinatra and Natalie Wood. He wrote several drafts of a screenplay for "A Walk on the Wild Side," but by the time the screen version was being shot it was so far removed from what he had written or had in mind that he refused any screen credit.