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In a posthumously published essay entitled" An American Lan-guage," Perry Miller returned to a theme that he had treated with definitive precision earlier: the" plain style." 1 Miller was obviously one of our great readers of the Puritan plain style, and his treatment of the subject in The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939) is still required reading on the subject. What sets Millers later essay apart, however, is that rather than just accounting for" the sermon, the treatise on polity, the history, the explanation of political theory"(" American Language" 211-12), Miller attempts to generate out of these forms a full-scale argument about American literary style that he can carry forward into our nineteenth-century great tradition and beyond. This was a radical departure from Miller s earlier insistence that" any criticism which endeavors to discuss Puritan writings as part of literary history" or to" estimate them from any …