Walter M. Miller Jr. (1922–1997) published his first story, “Secret of the Death Dome,” in Amazing in 1951, moved immediately to Astounding and Galaxy, and in the first half of the decade quickly established himself as the finest practitioner of the novelette and novella in the history of science fiction. Not a prolific contributor to Galaxy, his two 1952 novelettes “Conditionally Human” and “Command Performance” received great attention and were constantly imitated. His most famous novella is probably The Darfstellar (Astounding, January 1955) which won the first Hugo for short fiction; that year Miller published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction the first of the three religious novellas that were gathered at the end of the decade into a novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz, which won the Hugo in 1960. Miller, a combat air pilot in WWII, was severely damaged by his experiences, and after a difficult odyssey through science fiction, stopped publishing and probably writing. Nothing more appeared in his lifetime. His posthumous and uncompleted novel, St. Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, finished by Terry Bisson, was a commercial failure. Miller’s wife died in 1996, and he committed suicide the next year.