Tom Miller

Who is Tom Miller?

Tom Miller is an American author primarily known for travel literature. His ten books include The Panama Hat Trail, On the Border, Trading With the Enemy, and Jack Ruby's Kitchen Sink. He has written articles for the New York Times, Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Smithsonian, Natural History, Rolling Stone, Life, Crawdaddy and many other magazines.

A Washington, D.C. native, Tom Miller's childhood was full of reading. The family read three newspapers daily, and the bookshelves of his home were always full. His earliest travels would be to Camp Catawba, a summer boys' camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. He wrote for his high school newspaper, and by his fifth and final semester of college, was editor-in-chief of the school's weekly paper. But this was the late 1960s, and the underground, anti-war press had for him a cultural and political appeal the college presses lacked. He would continue through the early 1970s editing and authoring underground pamphlets, papers, and flyers.

By 1969 he had moved to Tucson, Arizona. He tried working odd jobs—selling encyclopedias door-to-door and working as a janitor, both jobs lasting four weeks—but focused on living cheaply and writing for whatever money he could earn. His first break would come after authoring a short piece for SunDance magazine that an editor at Esquire happened to read. He had been paid all of $15 to write the article; the editor suggested his magazine would have paid $750 for the same work. Soon he would find his first mainstream work with them.