Alice Duer Miller

Alice Duer Miller (born July 28, 1874, Staten Island, N.Y., U.S.—died Aug. 22, 1942, New York, N.Y.) was an American writer whose work—mostly her light, entertaining novels set among the upper classes—were frequently adapted for stage and film.

Alice Duer was of a wealthy and distinguished family and grew up on an estate in Weehawken, New Jersey. The family fortune was lost in a banking failure, however, and she made her way through Barnard College, New York City, by selling essays, poems, and stories to Harper’s and Scribner’s magazines. In 1896 her first book, entitled simply Poems, was published. In 1899, shortly after her graduation, she married Henry W. Miller, a businessman, with whom she lived in Costa Rica until 1903. During that time she continued to publish magazine pieces. After the Millers returned to New York, Alice Miller taught composition at a girls’ school and tutored in mathematics at Barnard until 1907, publishing during that period The Modern Obstacle (1903) and Caldron’s Prisoner (1904), the first of her many romantic novels. Thereafter she devoted herself to writing. The Blue Arch (1910), Things (1914), and Are Women People? (1915) followed. The last, a collection of satirical verses, took its title from the column she wrote for the New York Tribune from 1914 to 1917.

Miller’s first great success, Come Out of the Kitchen (1916), set the pattern for several subsequent novels; it was serialized in Harper’s, published in book form, and then adapted for Broadway and as a motion picture. In rapid succession came The Charm School (1919); Priceless Pearl (1924); The Reluctant Duchess (1925); Forsaking All Others (1931), a love story in verse; Gowns by Roberta (1933), which became the Jerome Kern–Otto Harbach musical hit Roberta; The Rising Star (1935); And One Was Beautiful (1937); and others. During the 1920s and ’30s Miller was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers and wits among whom her charming combination of the highest inherited social standing and carefree love of fun made her a much-loved figure. She spent much time in Hollywood writing scenarios and advising on matters of social custom, and in 1935 she played a small role (the spoiled daughter of a millionaire) in the Ben Hecht–Charles MacArthur film Soak the Rich.

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Her greatest success came in 1940 with the publication of The White Cliffs, a verse tale of love and fortitude in war-torn Britain. More than 700,000 copies had sold by the end of the war, and Lynn Fontanne’s reading of it had been broadcast on radio twice and recorded. The motion picture The White Cliffs of Dover (1944) was adapted from the story.