From the Publisher
This is the long-awaited biography of one of the twentieth century's greatest playwrights, Arthur Miller, whose postwar decade of work earned him international critical and popular acclaim. Christopher Bigsby's gripping, meticulously researched biography examines his refusal to name names before the notorious House on Un-American Activities Committee, offers new insights into Miller's marriage to Marilyn Monroe, and sheds new light on how their relationship informed Miller's subsequent great plays.
The New York Times -
Dwight Garner
Miller's story has already been told in his own very readable autobiography, Timebends, and most recently in Martin Gottfried's punchy and quarrelsome 2003 biography. Mr. Bigsby…arrives with new material, notably boxes of papers, including unfinished manuscripts, made available to him before Miller's death. He is a more sympathetic witness to Miller's life than Mr. Gottfried, if more prone to pedantic literary and cultural analysis. But the basic outlines of Miller's story are unchanged and as fascinating as ever.
Mark Alan Williams
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Library Journal
Bigsby (director, Arthur Miller Ctr., Univ. of East Anglia), who has introduced and edited many editions of Miller's plays, was a student and longtime friend of Miller and acquired-by gift from Miller himself-boxes of the author's personal papers shortly before Miller's death in 2005. Access to these papers, along with the long personal relationship, made possible this multiperspective masterpiece, which surpasses all other Miller biographies, including his autobiography, Timebends. Bigsby gives the reader an intense and personal look at Miller's life, from his birth in 1915 to moderately affluent Jewish American parents and his college years working at a newspaper to his intense attraction and eventual marriage to Marilyn Monroe and his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Everything is here, from the mundane to the revelatory. This detailed look at his life reveals his shared experiences as the basis for his sympathies for the common man. Recommended for all university and public libraries.
Kirkus Reviews
Copiously researched, deftly written biography that expands our understanding of a major figure in American letters. The success of All My Sons in 1947 gave Arthur Miller (1915-2005) enduring fame and an equally enduring, bifurcated reputation. Some hailed him as an honest, forceful voice in American theater, while others dismissed him as the mouthpiece of leftist pieties. Bigsby (American Studies/Univ. of East Anglia; Neil LaBute, 2008, etc.) gives a remarkably full account of this complex and somewhat remote figure, emphasizing the first half of Miller's life. (This makes sense, since the playwright repeatedly mined his past for subject matter.) The author draws on unpublished material and private papers, as well as numerous personal conversations and interviews with the playwright in the years before his death. Bigsby dutifully covers the major works-All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible-their productions on both sides of the Atlantic and their critical receptions. He gives particularly illuminating attention to Miller's university writings, his early life in the theater, his little-known work in radio and published and unpublished fiction. This helps give a fuller picture of the emerging writer, and Bigsby is good at identifying certain themes-a preoccupation with the consequences of actions, for example-that developed early on. Aided by his interviews with Miller, he writes sensitively about the lasting influence of relationships with family, friends, colleagues such as Elia Kazan, and wives, especially Marilyn Monroe. The author judiciously treats Miller's politics, including a dramatic appearance at the HUAC hearings, and he puts the playwright's deeply held views in thecontext of youthful experiences during the Depression. Without scanting Miller's moral seriousness, Bigsby doesn't really see him as an intellectual, writing that "he was in fact less concerned to engage with abstract ideas than with observed lives."A richly detailed, revealing look at the making of a playwright and a man.
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