A study guide for Walter M. Miller Jr.'s "A Canticle For Leibowitz"

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Walter M. Miller Jr.

1959

Introduction

Published in 1959 at the height of the Cold War, Walter M. Miller Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz is acknowledged as perhaps the greatest novel to deal with the potential disaster of a nuclear war. At the time of its publication, a war between the Soviet Union and the United States seemed almost inevitable and would have resulted in something between the destruction of technological civilization and the extermination of all life on earth. Miller takes as his starting point the commonplace that a nuclear war would, at a minimum, plunge humanity into a new dark ages. He develops this theme literally, telling his story as the history of a Catholic monastery in the American Southwest founded by Isaac Leibowitz, one of the few engineers left, and dedicated to preserving the few scraps of technical information that survived the war that the monks refer to as the Flame Deluge. In Miller's vision, history repeats itself exactly with a new Renaissance, fueled in part by the work of the monastery of St. Leibowitz, and a new Cold War, and finally another and more devastating nuclear war. The Order of Leibowitz finally renews its role of scientific preservation by helping to transport human civilization to an interstellar colony. Miller also deals presciently with the problems of abortion and euthanasia that have come to the fore of American culture in the twenty-first century, a debate that touched Miller personally as he struggled with suicidal depression from what today would be called post-traumatic stress disorder following his service as a bomber crewman in World War II. In this way Miller, like any great writer, transcends the limits of genre. Contrary to expectation, A Canticle for Leibowitz (like Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, perhaps the greatest artistic treatment of nuclear war in any medium) is not a tragedy but a comedy. Perhaps there is no other way to approach the insanity of its subject matter, which is ultimately the suicide of the entire human race.

Author Biography

Walter M. Miller Jr. was born in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, on January 23, 1923. His father was a railroad employee. During World War II, Miller served as a radioman and tail-gunner in the Mediterranean theater and flew fifty-three combat missions on B-25 bombers. He was especially affected by a mission in 1944 to bomb Monte Casino, the site of the oldest active monastery in Western Europe but also a key mountaintop position for the German Gustav Line. Attacking the historic landmark was controversial, and even the Nazis agreed to a