Arthur Miller: His Life and Work

by Martin Gottfried

Book Overview

Arthur Miller has been delivering powerful drama to the stage for decades with such masterpieces as Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge. 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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0306813777
• ISBN13: 9780306813771
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Length: 484 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

One of the better books from an uneven biographer

This is one of the best of Gottfried's books that I have read since the oversized Broadway Musicals volume of the '70s. I found his Fosse book exploitative and his life of Danny Kaye defensive. Miller was once the ultimate playwright and perhaps unique as one known as a personality. Gottfried walks a sword's edge between academic appreciation of his works and biographical information, highlighting the places where one informs the other. The book is the poorer because Miller chose not to cooperate with its biographical aspects. Thus, the title is a little unbalanced (it should almost be: His life and WORK). It also shares with the author's otherwise classy biography of George Burns the unavoidable flaw of having been written before the subjects death. You can see Gottfried straining a bit for an ending on the last page--how to tie up the mysteries of his subject into a neat little paragraph? But this makes engaging reading for theatre-goers, and is highly recommended for struggling playwrights, actors, etc.

A definitive work on an important but not Promethean figure

Arthur Asher Miller is famous, as this book's back cover sums up, for three things: his own body of work, his defiance of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the mid-1950s, and his marriage to "the most famous of movie stars" (Gottfried's quote), namely Marilyn Monroe. In his own country, Miller is, also as Gottfried says, unappreciated to the point of scorn. My only disappointment with this work-and it is a fine book-is that he does not explore this aspect of Miller's relationship to the "vox populi", whom his work, like that of Rockwell and Springsteen, is supposed to relate to. My own observation is that one's attitude to Miller-as playwright, as 'Mr.Marilyn Monroe', as human being-often is, like an artificial horizon indicator of one's own sociopolitical attitudes. Those listing to port will invariably uphold Miller as the great conscience of his generation whilst those heading starboard will dismiss him pretty perfunctorily as merely another "Intellectual", in the vein of those figures of derision Paul Johnson deftly skewers in his volume of that title. Actors, or those considering themselves as such, place Miller's work on a great pedestal, and the technical merits of his work are considerable and generally undisputed. However,Miller's sense of life, so to speak, is not essentially noble, but essentially fatalist and indifferent. Miller, personally, despite his wealth, critical success, and longevity-he's still working at 88-is not a figure one wants to view sympathetically, and I certainly do not. He left his first wife and ran off with a very public movie star whom he had ample reason to know would be very high maintenance, and, like an intricately built exotic car in the hands of a teenager, didn't maintain her well at all. While it's certain he had no direct involvement in her death, he was something of a negligent husband who failed to effectively deal with her dependencies on barbituates and psychoanalysis, and tormented her for her indiscretions with Yves Montand despite the fact that he'd done the same thing whilst she was married to Joe DiMaggio. To rub salt into the wounds, as percieved by the American public, he failed to attend her funeral and then proceeded to write a play (After the Fall)in which an unmistakably Monroe-alter-ego character is dealt with cruelly. Make no mistake, there are many theatre-goers who flatly hate Arthur Miller. Many of those will snort with indignation when they read, in this volume for perhaps the first time, that Miller's son (with third wife Inge Morath) was born with Down''s syndrome and perfunctorily institutionalized, or Miller's unprovoked attack on a journalist in 1995-inasmuch as he was 80 at the time, however, many may more disdain the journalist (a healthy male in his early thirties) for "not besting the old Bolshevist", as one conservative commentator said. Ultimately, it's his work that will either uphold Miller as the great playwright-of his nation, of his century, even,as o

A wealth of information and insight into one man's life

Expertly written by award-winning drama critic and biographer Martin Gottfried, Arthur Miller: His Life And Work is the exhaustive and superbly presented biography of the award winning American playwright, and knowledgeably examines his life and his theatrical creations in close detail. A wealth of information and insight into one man's life and his timeless, century-defining plays set Arthur Miller: His Life And Work quite apart among notable and worthy biographies. No academic or community library American Theater History or American Biography collection can be complete without the inclusion of Arthur Miller: His Life And Work.