Linda Patterson Miller, Ph.D.

Linda Miller Headshot
Distinguished Professor, English
Sutherland
Penn State Abington
1600 Woodland Road
Abington, PA 19001

Research/Creative Interests and Innovations

Dr. Miller publishes in all areas of American studies, but her specialty is early twentieth-century American literature and art and the development of Modernism. Her articles on American writers and artists have appeared in such journals as Mosaic, Renascence, American Transcendental Quarterly, Journal of Modern Literature, North Dakota Quarterly, Studies in American Fiction, The Mailer Review, and The Hemingway Review, as well as in several edited book collections. Much of Miller’s research has focused on American expatriates in France during the 1920s, and she is perhaps best known for her studies on the Lost Generation, including her book Letters from the Lost Generation: Gerald and Sara Murphy and Friends (published in an expanded edition with University Press of Florida, 2002).

Selected publications/exhibitions/performances list

Most recently, Dr. Miller served as a primary consultant for the multi-media art exhibit “Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara & Gerald Murphy.”  This exhibit traveled nationally during 2007 and 2008 to Williams College Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, and Yale University Art Gallery. Miller’s essay “Gerald Murphy in Letters, Literature, and Life” appears in the exhibition catalog Making It New (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), and Miller presented several public lectures in conjunction with this exhibit, including at the Dallas Museum of Art in August 2008.  Miller has served as a scholarly consultant on expatriate American writers and artists for American Playhouse, PBS, and she has appeared as guest scholar on Ernest Hemingway for C-Span’s ongoing series American Writers: A Journey Through History. Dr. Miller chairs the Editorial Review Board for the Cambridge Edition of the Ernest Hemingway Letters, and her foreword will appear in the forthcoming Volume 1 (1899-1922). Miller has two essays forthcoming in The Hemingway Review, one on Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden and another on how Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn influenced Hemingway’s writing of In Our Time.  Miller’s most recent article in The Mailer Review, “Woman Redux: deKooning, Mailer and American Abstract Expressionism” (Volume 3, No. 1, 2009, pp. 299-306) reflects her ongoing interest in the impact that graphic art has had on American writers (including Norman Mailer and Hemingway) throughout the twentieth century. Miller’s essay “Remembering Fitzgerald: Fanny Myers Brennan and Honoria Murphy Donelly Interviews” (The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, Volume 8, 2010) draws upon her continued research on the Lost Generation.

Teaching Interests and courses taught

English 3: The Great Traditions in American Literature
English 15: Rhetoric and Composition
English 133: Modern American Literature to World War II
English 140: Contemporary Literature
English 184: The Short Story
English 231: American Literature to 1865
English 232: American Literature from 1865
English 262: Reading Fiction
English 400: Fitzgerald, Hemingway and the Lost Generation
English 432: The Americna Novel to 1900
English 433: The American Novel: 1900-1945
English 435: The American Short Story
English 436: American Fiction Since 1945
English 487W Senior Seminar: topics have included American Autobiography, the American Short Story, Ernest Hemingway, and the Life and Art of the Lost Generation

Selected awards, grants, patents, other honors

Danforth Foundation Associate
Lilly Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow
Atherton Teaching Award (2004)