Arthur Miller: His Life And Work

by Martin Gottfried

Arthur Miller has been delivering powerful drama to the stage for decades with such masterpieces as Death of a Salesman. But, remarkably, no one has yet told the full story of Miller's own extraordinary life-a rich life, much of it shrouded from public view. To achieve this groundbreaking portrait of the artist and the man, the award-winning drama critic and biographer Martin Gottfried masterfully draws on his interviews with those who have known Miller throughout his personal and professional life, on Miller's voluminous lifelong correspondence, and on the annotated scripts and notebooks that reveal Miller's creative process in stunning detail. From Miller's childhood and adolescence in Depression-era New York City to his formative college years in Michigan…from the numerous early professional rejections to the 1947 play All My Sons that established him as a voice to be reckoned with…from his heroic defiance of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy years to his most unlikely pairing with Marilyn Monroe… from political and social activism on the world stage to an extraordinary professional vitality even as he turns 88 in October 2003 (he is still writing plays, and stage revivals and film adaptations of his classics proliferate): here is a dazzling book-a literary event of the first order.

Genres: Biography, History, Nonfiction, Drama

496 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Martin Gottfried,was a New York drama critic for over forty years and the author of five biographies and two books of theater criticism.

Gottfried graduated from Columbia College in New York City in 1959,and attended Columbia Law School for three semesters, next spending one year with U.S. Army Military Intelligence.Gottfried began his writing career as the classical music critic for The Village Voice, doubling as an off-Broadway reviewer for Women's Wear Daily, a position that made him the youngest member of the New York Drama Critics Circle in the organization's history.

Winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism and recipient of two Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, Martin Gottfried was the chief dramatic critic for the New York Post and Saturday Review. He is the author of A Theater Divided, Jed Harris: The Curse of Genius, All His Jazz: The Life and Death of Bob Fosse, Balancing Act: The Authorized Biography of Angela Lansbury and Nobody’s Fool: The Lives of Danny Kaye.

Reviews

[Joseph Anthony Hopper · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book as I knew very little about A Miller other than he was a famous playwright and married to Marilyn Monroe, his life story is fascinating and complex and this book is so well written and researched. I have to be honest that I didn’t read a lot of the plays manuscripts that are quoted in the book in full depth I just scan read them. A fascinating story about about a very complex man.

[Ben Ballin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a lengthy tome, and you feel the weight of it at times. Having read Miller's fine autobiography 'Timebends' and enjoyed it, I was familiar with the basic trajectory of the great playwright's life: via depression-era New York childhood to celebrated young author of the early classics, 'All My Sons', 'Death of A Salesman' and 'The Crucible', via a famous run-in with the Committee for Unamerican Activities, marriage to Marilyn Monroe, and thus to venerable left wing man of letters, defender of writers' rights, carpenter and part time farmer. This biography throws a bittersweet light over that life, his many contradictions, including his many years of critical disfavour in his home country (though curiously never in Europe, including the UK). Its many passages of textual exegesis reveal the autobiographical strands that were never far from the surface in Miller's work, usually convincingly so. However, there are idiosyncratic tics along the way, not least a desire to always see 'echo names' in the plays' characters - obvious with, say, Maggie in 'After The Fall' (written soon after the divorce from Monroe), less so elsewhere. For Gottfried, there are two pivotal moment in Miller's life: the Wall Street Crash that impoverished his formerly comfortable family (and gave birth inter alia to Willy Loman and his sons); and the affair with, marriage to and divorce from Marilyn. Miller's own book emphasises the former, plays down the latter. The Marilyn emphasis leads the biographer to adopt a rather gossipy tone at times, and he occasionally slips into psychobabble. He is on surer ground with the work itself, and Miller's sometimes difficult artistic relationships - notably with the extraordinary Elia Kazan. He certainly made me want to know more about the later plays, especially the little-performed 'Playing For Time.' Over all, however, if I were to steer a newcomer towards an account of Miller's life, I would choose the autobiography. It may serve the myth more uncritically, but it is better written and - while inevitably selective - gives more of sense of the man behind an extraordinary body of work, and his long, varied and generally honourable life.

[Cathy McGough]

Interesting man. Interesting life.

[James Ricks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this right now. Not sure about it yet.