Neil Miller

In early 20th century Boston, The Watch and Ward Society put a stranglehold on morally suspect material, from “hoochy-coochy” dancers to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Upton Sinclair’s Oil. Join Tufts professor Neil Miller as he reads from this fascinating history. Reading may be cancelled if ... (more)deemed inappropriate (just kidding).

"One comes away from Miller's page-turner with a reverence, almost an unalloyed love for Tenen, Tufts, and the Kartchner family that owned the land under which the young spelunkers discovered the cave."Tuscon Weekly

Kartchner Caverns tells the story of two young spelunkers, just out of the University ... (more)of Arizona, who stumbled upon some fantastically beautiful caves on a southern Arizona hillside, kept them secret for 14 years out of fear they might be looted and destroyed, and eventually succeeded in having them developed as a state park. The book is a non-fiction narrative, extensively researched, that brings to life an important piece of contemporary Western history. It is an adventure story, a character study of two eco-heroes, and a chronicle of the triumph of the environmental approach in a corner of the natural world where pillage, not preservation, had been the norm.

Neil Miller teaches journalism and nonfiction writing in the English department at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. He is a former staff writer at the Boston Phoenix. Miller is the author of five books, including Sex-Crime Panic: A Journey to the Paranoid Heart of the 1950s
and Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present. His articles have appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and a number of other publications.