The early decades of the twentieth century were a period of sustained expansion in American letters, as writers moved between poetry, fiction, and the emerging demands of commercial entertainment. Alice Duer Miller was born into that world on July 28, 1874, in New York City, and she remained connected to that city until her death there on August 22, 1942.

Educated at Barnard College, Miller worked across a notably wide range of forms. She was a poet, a novelist, a screenwriter, and a ghostwriter, and she also worked as an actor. A citizen of the United States who wrote in English, she identified as a feminist throughout her life. That combination of roles — literary and performative, credited and uncredited — placed her across several different corners of the cultural landscape at once.

Her output as a novelist and screenwriter situated her at the junction of literary and popular forms. She wrote both novels and screenplays, moving between the demands of sustained narrative prose and the compressed, visual requirements of the screen. Her work as a ghostwriter extended that range further still, into a mode of authorship defined by its absence from public view. Taken together, these varied practices describe a writer whose career resisted easy categorization.

Among her writings, the verse novel The White Cliffs is the most specifically documented. It represents the intersection of her work as a poet and her experience with longer narrative structures, drawing on both to produce something that neither category alone fully describes. Miller died in New York City on August 22, 1942, and The White Cliffs remains the work most directly associated with her name.