Who is Walter James Miller? Walter James Miller is a poet, playwright, critic, translator and professor of English at N.Y.U. where he created and taught the Great Books course for many years. His Great Books course was highlighted in the August 1996 edition of New York Magazine. The article, "Cool Classes, Great Teachers" had this to say about Walter's Great Books Course at NYU: Miller expects his students to do their reading assignments and come to class, but not necessarily in that order. "Most adults don't go to a play until after they've read the review; I understand that," he says. And he recognizes that most students don't read the classics until they've picked up, just through living, plenty about them. "I heard about 'To be or not to be' long before I read Hamlet," he says. Coming from most of us, it would be an unstartling admission. Coming from a teacher who is passionate about Aristophanes and Austen and LeGuin — and passionate about conveying their artistry to continuing education students — it is bracing evidence of common sense. Miller, once a public affairs officer for General Patton, is able to draw, and captivate, students from age 15 (a girl who sat in on a class with her father) to age 75, from literary novices to ardent rereaders. "I've been an adult education student for a little over two decades, and I've had 40 to 50 courses," says Joe Haedrich. "There is no one else like Professor Miller. I took the class because I had been a business major — didn't know anything about literature — and felt my education was lacking. But you learn as much about history and philosophy as you do about fiction. He himself knows everything. It's not smartness he has; it's wisdom." His poetry first attracted the attention of writers like W. H. Auden, when his early work appeared in the Brooklyn College Observer. Miller honed his skills as a writer of prose and verse while serving in Infantry public relations in World War Two, turning out hundreds of articles about combat heroes and Army life generally. He won a prize from the Armed Forces Service League for his short story, "Two Soldiers Stopped for Water," published in the anthology Fighting Words. His teaching at engineering colleges in Brooklyn and Colorado helped produce some classical articles on technical writing and his first book Engineers as Writers. At New York University his appointment as full professor resulted partly from his pioneering studies in Jules Verne (e.g., his Annotated Jules Verne series) and partly from his innovative work on television and radio. His NBC documentary Master Builders of America won a Special Award from the Engineers Council for Professional Development, and for fifteen years his author-interview show, Reader's Almanac, was a fixture on National Public Radio. His verse drama Joseph in the Pit was produced off-Broadway in 1993 and 2002. The 67 volumes he has authored, co-authored, or contributed to include Making an Angel: Poems, Love's Mainland: New & Selected Poems, book-length studies of Vonnegut, Heller, Sinclair, Beckett, Doctorow, and Bradbury, and most recently, prefaces to Signet Classics editions of Bellamy, Mary Shelley and Verne. He has written the "Introduction" and annotations for the first-ever English edition of Verne's The Mighty Orinoco (Wesleyan University Press, 2003). He has been working for two decades on his memoir, From Auden to Vonnegut: My Life among Writers. His trophies include the Charles Angoff Award for Excellence in Poetry, the Great Teacher Award from NYU Alumni, The Second Harvest Award from Brooklyn College Alumni, and five children (devoted severally to creativity in science, social science, and business) and four grandchildren. Long a surfcaster in Long Island and Carolina waters, camper in the Rockies and New England, he now divides his time between writing in Brooklyn, lecturing in Manhattan, and reading his poetry everywhere.