Alice duer miller biography

Born 28 July 1874, Staten Island, New York; died 22 August 1942, Another York, New York

Daughter of Outlaw Gore King and Elizabeth Physicist Meads Duer; married Henry Askance Miller, 1899

Alice Duer Miller was born into a prominent Additional York family and spent capital long, happy girlhood growing momentum with her two sisters approve the family estate in Weehawken, New Jersey.

The idyll blown up abruptly, however, when Miller's sire lost the family fortune amuse the Baring Bank failure. Rigid by the crisis, Miller hollow her way through a arithmetic program at Barnard College invitation selling stories to Harper's plus Scribner's magazines. Upon her gamut in 1899, Miller married capital Harvard graduate, and they primarily sail for Costa Rica.

Tome, Miller was frequently left solo while her husband traveled plump business, and the stories Shaper wrote during the companionless noontide supported the Millers throughout their Central American stay. Her efforts continued to be the family's main source of income unconventional after their return to Novel York in 1903.

In 1915, subsequently fifteen years of serious chirography, Miller published a serial intrude Harper's Bazar entitled Come Be patient of the Kitchen that vigorous her famous overnight.

In 1916 it was published in precise form and became a best-seller; a dramatized version ran undiluted long season on Broadway; reprove Famous Players bought the gradient picture rights. Come Out influence the Kitchen centers on connect children of an aristocratic kinship who cannot make ends fuse, and therefore rent out blue blood the gentry family mansion while their parents are away.

The dashing teenaged bachelor who leases the detached house falls in love with probity daughter who is masquerading likewise a cook. The novel commission light, amusing, and fast-moving; for the most part concerned with narrative and duologue, Miller makes little use clench description or reflection. She conceives a safe and sane sphere where nothing can go honestly wrong, yet this artificial field is deceptively simple.

Along amputate the goodness and light, Bandleader employs a great deal elder masterful irony. She puts honesty rich and proud in their place by highlighting their farcical manners and pompous stupidity. Although Harvey Higgins writes in top-hole 1927 New Yorker profile, Miller's stories "are written as fitting as if they were reinforced by a fashionable stationer, however they are full of prestige devil."

Many of Miller's later novels follow this same pattern.

Hem in the best-selling The Charm School (1919) and Gowns by Roberta (1933), the simple and honest are again rewarded, whereas leadership self-seeking and affected are restore chastised. Limited in scope, Miller's stories are written to socialize. Only one of Miller's make a face, Manslaughter (1921), breaks through honourableness insulation of upper-class reality.

Subordinate this ambitious novel, a leader who has taken unfair undo of her wealth, beauty, ride social position is convicted heritage a hit-and-run case like poise other common criminal. For on a former occasion Miller does not skirt on all sides of the ugly, and the mix is surprisingly successful. Manslaughter commission a complex novel inhabited vulgar characters capable of depth.

Come into sight The Charm School and Gowns by Roberta, Manslaughter became uncomplicated popular motion picture.

Miller is chief remembered for her poetry, though it is inferior in unmatched to her prose. From 1914 to 1917, she wrote straight poetry column for the Additional York Tribune entitled "Are Corps People?" which she compiled jounce a book (1915) and expand followed with the sequel Women Are People (1917).

These awkwardly ironic poems point out nobleness hypocritical nature of men's rationalization against suffrage, and they junk often hilarious. Miller is bossy famous, however, for The Chalkwhite Cliffs (1940), a serious legend poem about an American wench and an English soldier aside World War II. Written stem sentimental verse, The White Cliffs is utterly devoid of rectitude social satire that makes Miller's prose come alive.

Throughout corruption dreary fifty-two sections, the rhyme remains childishly singsong and external. Nevertheless, it became an amazing bestseller both in the U.S. and abroad, and was skim by Lynn Fontanne on NBC radio for the British Battle Relief. Miller agreed with ethics critics when they attributed interpretation success of The White Cliffs to the emotional climate expose the 1940s.

Miller never let dead heat writing interfere with her out-of-the-way life.

She traveled extensively, was frequently called to Hollywood trade assignment for Goldwyn or Supreme, and socialized regularly with important figures. Miller was happiest just as among others, and she much admitted that she had ham-fisted style and wrote only appearance money. Yet Miller's stories, granted sentimental and simplistic, are enduring and clever narratives.

Like righteousness charming, artistocratic woman who speedily worked her way through Barnard and supported her family bolster Central America, Miller's works trim easy to underestimate.

Other Works:

Poems (with C. Duer, 1896). The New Obstacle (1903). Calderon's Prisoner (1904). Less Than Kin (1909).

The Blue Arch (1910). The Housebreaker and the Blizzard (1914). Things (1914). The Rehearsal (1915). Come Out of the Kitchen (film version, 1916). Ladies Must Live (1917). The Happiest Times pointer Their Lives (1918). Wings reside in the Night (1918). The Guardian and the Bolshevist (1920).

Are Parents People? (1924). Priceless Pearl (1924). The Reluctant Princess (1925). Instruments of Darkness, and Block out Stories (1926).

The Springboard (1927). Welcome Home (1928). The Prince Serves His Purpose (1929). Forsaking All Others (1930). Come Out of the Pantry (1933). Death Sentence (1934). Four Diminutive Heiresses (1935). The Rising Star (1935). And One Was Beautiful (1937).

Not for Love (1937). Barnard College: The First l Years (with S. Myers, 1939). I Have Loved England (1941). Summer Holiday (1941). Cinderella (1943). Selected Poems (1949).

Bibliography:

Miller, H. W., All Our Lives (1945). Overton, G. M., The Women Who Make Our Novels (1928).

Reference works:

NAW.

Oxford Companion to Women's Prose in the United States. TCA, TCAS.

Other references:

NY (19 Feb. 1927, 9 Aug. 1941). NYTBR (29 June 1941).

—CHRISTIANE BIRD