Walter M. Miller Jr.

Walter M. Miller Jr. wrote A Canticle for Leibowitz, in which monks preserve the fragments of a destroyed civilisation, after taking part in the destruction of a monastery himself. He flew more than fifty missions as a radio operator and tail gunner with the US Army Air Forces in Italy, including the bombing of the abbey of Monte Cassino in February 1944 - the sixth-century foundation of Saint Benedict, reduced to rubble on the suspicion that Germans were using it, which they were not. He converted to Catholicism after the war. The novel, assembled in 1959 from three published novellas, spans eighteen hundred years after a nuclear war: an order of monks in the American southwest copying and illuminating documents they cannot understand, including a shopping list, through a new dark age, a new renaissance, and a second nuclear war. Its argument about whether knowledge can be kept without wisdom is why it has stayed in print and why it is one of the few science fiction novels regularly taught outside the genre. The preservation of texts by monastic copying - Wycliffe, the Lollards and the vernacular Bible belong to the same argument - is its explicit model. He wrote almost nothing else, lived as a recluse for thirty years, and shot himself in 1996. A Canticle for Leibowitz won the Hugo Award in 1961. He suffered from what he never named publicly and what his friends described as post-traumatic stress from the war, and he published no further novel in his lifetime. A sequel he had been working on for decades was completed by another writer and published after his death.

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