Samhi C.

“Can’t even count. Decades. I came here during the 80s. The 1980s.”

This was Dr. Linda Patterson Miller’s response when asked how long she had been teaching at Abington. Her overall teaching career extends even further back.

Dr. Miller, or Miss Miller, as I am fond of calling her from my time in two of her classes, is a Hemingway fan, avid reader, researcher, writer, and professor. Her insights into literature impact a number of students every year, but they transcend the literary realm and apply to real life and real opportunities.

Miller spent her childhood reading as many books as she could from her local library and she loved her English classes. Naturally, by the time she reached her college years, she says, “It wasn’t even a question, of course I’d major in English.” For her, books were “such an adventure and such excitement because you never knew what you were stepping into.”

Dr. Miller spent time at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, she met her now-husband, Randall Miller, who is a history professor at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Miller says, “We started out as really good friends, which I think is the best way to start a good relationship.” They married the summer she graduated.

She graduated college in an era in which women had limited career options. She noted that “at that time, women weren’t going into these high power positions and the traditional jobs were nursing, teaching, secretarial.” Teaching “Seemed like such a logical thing to do.”

She moved on to teach in Columbus, Ohio where her husband was working on his history Ph.D. at Ohio State. There, she made use of a free grad school tuition program for public school teachers and earned her Master’s in English at Ohio State while teaching English and Art (which she had minored in). She says that inner city life was challenging, but she loved her students, many of whom were the children of migrant workers. In this community, she was “introduced to the importance of diversity and embracing diversity and learning from each other.”

Eventually, when she and her husband moved to the East Coast, she got her Ph.D. at the University of Delaware. She was interested in authors like Fitzgerald and Hemingway from reading their works in college. While taking a course on research methods, with the requirement to write a paper with original documents, she visited Princeton to look at a collection of F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s letters. When she found a thin folder with letters from a couple called the Murphys, she thought it would be an easy read. But, as Miller teaches to her students, even compact writing can be creative and complex. The folder included a letter from a woman, Sara Murphy, who berated Fitzgerald, as paraphrased by Miller, for being “crazy,” and noting that “he didn’t know anybody, least of all himself.” The letter was signed “Love Sara”.

Dr. Miller’s curiosity was instantly sparked. Her one question: “Who is Sara?”

She instinctively felt that there must be letters in reply to Sara’s. She tracked down Sara and Gerald Murphy’s daughter, who shared various letters, not just between the Murphys and Fitzgerald but also from other twentieth-century writers such as Hemingway and Archibald MacLeash. These writers were some of the Lost Generation, a group of writers who gathered in Villa America in 1920s Paris, dropping their lives in America, to find inspiration for their creative works. 

Dr. Miller says it was “like a gold mine finding those papers,” to be read into the “cultural history and lives of American expatriate artists” and writers. She went on to collect these letters and develop a book titled “Letters of the Lost Generation,” which she uses in her course on modernism in literature.

But, why Hemingway? 

Miller confesses “that Hemingway began to take over [as I read various twentieth century works]… Not so much Hemingway the man, but Hemingway the writer… What he did with writing changed the way people write in the twentieth century.” She was stimulated by the question, “What is it in his writing that makes it so powerful?” She loves the way that “Hemingway would go to the museums, Modernist museums [and] he wanted to write the way the painters painted.”

Today, she is part of The Hemingway Society and Foundation in which there is an “exciting dynamic with people from all over the world studying Hemingway.” Through this foundation, she is working on a seventeen-volume project about his letters at University Park. The project is currently in its sixth volume.

In her opinion, “Contemporary writers have had a difficult time of a ‘new way of seeing’, trying to compete with modern literature.” And there is also a distaste she has towards gratuitous explicit sexual content. She feels that sometimes, it is better to leave it to the imagination. She says “That’s more powerful in a way. As Hemingway says, what you leave out is more important than what you put in. And if you do a good job, the reader will feel it.” She feels many contemporary writers in general, “need to leave out more than they do.”

Despite her issues with the narrative styles of twenty-first century authors, she admits that she has a deep appreciation for the upcoming genre of autofiction–the idea of drawing on one’s own life. She says it’s like a “memoir under the guise of fiction. That direction in contemporary literature, I really do like.” 

While Miller believes Hemingway’s work changed the way twentieth century writers wrote, I find that her teachings have and will continue to change the way many twenty-first century students think and write. She teaches her students the importance of experimentation in voice, diversity in belief, while also stressing the importance of “less is more.”

At one point during our conversation,  Miss Miller told me that we don’t always know where we’re going to go with our work, our careers. She says, “It’s important to keep your eyes open and when an opportunity comes, to embrace it.” She didn’t expect to end up where she is today, but she couldn’t imagine her life any other way. She takes pride in introducing her students to “the life of the mind, to art, to books.”

I believe that Dr. Miller’s good fortune in building a career out of researching the Lost Generation, and becoming a teacher to pass on the lessons she learned is all of her students’ good fortune, too.