Description
A great theater critic brings twentieth-century playwright Arthur Miller’s dramatic story to life with bold and revealing new insights
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“Lahr’s cogent analyses are revelatory. . . . He does not reduce the work to the life, but shows how it explains the life from which it emerges.”-Willard Spiegelman, Wall Street Journal
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“New Yorker critic Lahr shines in this searching account of the life of playwright Arthur Miller. . . . It’s a great introduction to a giant of American letters.”-Publishers Weekly
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Distinguished theater critic John Lahr brings unique perspective to the life of Arthur Miller (1915-2005), the playwright who almost single-handedly propelled twentieth-century American theater to a new level of cultural sophistication. Organized around the fault lines of Miller’s life-his family, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, Elia Kazan and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Marilyn Monroe, Vietnam, and the rise and fall of Miller’s role as a public intellectual-this book demonstrates the synergy between Arthur Miller’s psychology and his plays.
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Concentrating largely on Miller’s most prolific decades of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Lahr probes Miller’s early playwriting failures; his work writing radio plays during World War II after being rejected for military service; his only novel, Focus; and his succession of award-winning and canonical plays that include All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible, providing an original interpretation of Miller’s work and his personality.
