Nathan Miller, 77, author, reporter

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Nathan Miller, 77, author, reporter

BALTIMORE (AP) -- Nathan Miller, a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun and the author of more than a dozen American history and biography books, died Oct. 22 at the Washington Home, a nursing home where he had lived since suffering a stroke two years ago. He was 77.

"Every newspaper person has a yearning to be an author. Nat didn't talk about it; he went out and did it, and he managed to draw thousands of readers into naval and presidential history," said James H. Bready, a retired editorial writer and author of a monthly column on regional books for the Sun.

Mr. Miller's last book, "New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America," was published by Charles Scribner's & Sons 14 months after Mr. Miller's stroke. Mr. Bready called it "a climax to his earlier works."

"It wasn't about battleships and presidents but of the U.S. coming alive and into its own after World War I," he said.

Mr. Miller hypothesized that the roaring '20s -- including flappers, fast automobiles, Babe Ruth, radio, Al Capone, talking pictures, jazz, bootleg liquor and the soaring stock market before the crash leading to the Great Depression -- were not an aberration but, to "an astonishing degree were a precursor to modern excesses."

A Baltimore native, Mr. Miller dropped out of high school to enlist in the Navy in 1944. After his 1946 discharge, Mr. Miller earned his General Educational Development certificate, then bachelor's and master's degrees in history from the University of Maryland at College Park.

He began his career in journalism in the early 1950s as a reporter for the Evening Capital in Annapolis, where he worked until joining the Sun in 1954 as a police reporter. He later was promoted to general-assignment and political reporter. He became the first chief of the newspaper's Rio de Janeiro bureau and in 1966 joined the Sun's Washington bureau.

He quit in 1969 to become an investigator and speechwriter for Sen. John L. McClellan, Arkansas Democrat, on the permanent subcommittee on investigations and later the Senate Appropriations Committee.

His first book, "Sea of Glory: A Naval History of the American Revolution, " which chronicled the Navy's birth, was published in 1974. Mr. Miller left the congressional staff in 1977 to pursue writing full time. The Naval Institute Press published his book, "The U.S. Navy: A History," that year.

A four-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, Mr. Miller was the first writer to explore the letters of Theodore Roosevelt and his first wife, Alice Lee, in his "Theodore Roosevelt: A Life," published in 1992.

He returned to the Sun during the 1980s to work as a summer replacement for vacationing editorial writers.

Mr. Miller's wife, Jeanette, died this summer. Mr. Miller's survivors include his brother, Samuel J. Miller, of Towson.