The title of this book by Perry Miller, a world-famous interpreter of the American past, nearly poses the question it has been his lifelong purpose to answer: What was the underlying aim of the first colonists in coming to America? Miller emphasizes the need for understanding the human sources from which the American mainstream has risen.

Essays on Puritanism's effect on the religious, philosophic and literary life in America and the tendency to see the U.S. as "nature's nation".

There is a small class of scholars whose aims and pursuits are of a different character. They value literature not as an end, but as an instrument to help ...