Walter James Miller

Walter James Miller (January 16, 1918 – June 20, 2010) was an American literary critic, playwright, poet, translator and publisher. The author, co-author, editor and/or translator of more than sixty books, including four landmark annotated translations of novels by Jules Verne, Miller taught at Hofstra University, Polytechnic Institute of New York University, Colorado State University, and for over 40 years at New York University, where he created and taught a popular "Great Books" course. In 1980, he received the NYU Alumni Great Teacher Award. For fifteen years in the 1960s and 1970s, his Peabody Award-winning show Reader's Almanac was a fixture on WNYC, public radio in New York City, and broadcast interviews with many established and rising authors and poets, including Nadine Gordimer, Andrew Glaze, Allen Ginsberg, James Kirkwood Jr., William Packard, Sidney Offit, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut Jr and Steven Kunes. (A compilation of Miller's several interviews with Vonnegut was published by Caedmon Audio in 2006.