ARTHUR MILLER

Highlights from the life and career of one of America’s most famous playwrights.

“Why are you a revolutionary?” Arthur Miller (1915-2005) asked himself in one of his notebooks. “Because the truth is revolutionary and the truth you shall live by.” In the latest installment of the publisher’s Jewish Lives series, Lahr, whose 2014 biography of Tennessee Williams won the National Book Critics Circle Award, shows the ways in which that truth-seeking spirit manifested itself in one of the most storied playwriting careers ever. Miller grew up in Jewish Harlem, and his father, Isidore Miller, was the owner of a financially successful clothing company before the Depression wiped out the family’s savings. His “unhappy” mother, Augusta, believed that “Arty” had a “special destiny,” but his high school grades were so bad that no college would accept him. He eventually attended the University of Michigan, where he would “soak up” Marxism, gain sympathy for the working class, and learn to incorporate politics and family life into landmarks of the American theater, including All My Sons and Death of a Salesman. Lahr takes readers through the highs and lows of his subject’s life: the antisemitism he faced; his break with director Elia Kazan over Kazan’s willingness to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee; and his three marriages, including a disastrous union with Marilyn Monroe. Lahr cites Miller’s autobiography, Timebends, so often that some readers may want to go directly to the original source. He does a good job, however, showing how Miller’s experiences informed plays such as The Golden Years, The Price, The Crucible, and the Pulitzer-winning Salesman. Lahr also excels in his analyses of Miller’s works, including his one novel, Focus, which showed how alienation and mindlessness were “part of the equation that results in anti-Semitism,” and plays such as 1964’s After the Fall, his first after his marriage to Monroe, a flawed work that is nonetheless “extraordinary as a map of Miller’s internal geography.”

An engaging summary of a celebrated and checkered career.