Arthur Miller: His Life And Work [Hardcover]

Martin Gottfried (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 14, 2003

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Former New York Post drama critic Gottfried (Sondheim) shares an illuminating and profound picture of playwright Miller. Outraged at the shameful critical disrespect heaped in recent years on the author of Death of a Salesman and All My Sons, Gottfried carefully analyzes all Miller's plays to rebut the adverse comments. An indifferent student, son of a father barely literate yet successful as a women's clothing manufacturer, Miller (b. 1915) blossomed in college and produced promising works: Final Curtain, Honors at Dawn and They Too Arise. The Jewish Miller married Catholic Mary Grace Slattery, the daughter of anti-Semitic parents, and persevered despite the failure of his first production, The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944). After this rejection, Miller consciously aimed to create a commercial hit, accomplished with All My Sons. Gottfried leads readers through the playwright's meticulous work regimen-his attention to potential titles, dialogue and scene descriptions, pointing out that it took five years, six drafts and 700 pages before Miller was satisfied with his first hit. Material about Marilyn Monroe is incorporated seamlessly throughout the text, and Gottfried refuses to unbalance his overall literary study with sensationalism. He compellingly presents the Miller/Elia Kazan artistic collaborations and doesn't avoid unflattering details (e.g., his subject's tendency toward pomposity and his tight-fisted financial attitude) but also expresses admiration for Miller's willingness to offer informer Lee J. Cobb a starring role in A View from the Bridge. (Miller discussed his plays with Gottfried, but not his life.) Only Inge Morath, Miller's third wife, remains shadowy. Fortunately, personal stories are refreshingly secondary in one of the rare books that makes the playwriting process comprehensible and consistently involving.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New Yorker

At the mid-century moment when psychological realism, moral seriousness, and progressive politics formed our dominant literary aesthetic, the Broadway success of "All My Sons" catapulted Miller to fame, not just as a playwright but as an exemplar: the intellectual as superstar, mighty enough to engage the country's conscience, sexy enough to make Marilyn Monroe his bride. Gottfried traces Miller's development from his family's devastation in the 1929 stock-market crash through his leftist indoctrination at the University of Michigan and his literary ascendancy and shows a man emotionally remote and professionally sanctimonious, who complained, for instance, that audiences were supposed to "think, not weep" at "Death of a Salesman." While Miller's own interest in psychology doubtless encourages such biographical scrutiny, the dutiful Ping-Ponging between life and writings unfortunately amplifies the sense of the playwright's self-involvement and mutes the sense of his achievement.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press; 1ST edition (August 14, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306812142
• ISBN-13: 978-0306812149
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,329,080 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A definitive work on an important but not Promethean figure, June 13, 2004

By 

Keith Carlsen "widgeonkeeper" (Asheville, NC, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Arthur Miller: His Life And Work (Hardcover)

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 one actor avers in this book, along with Shakespeare,of his species-or merely an important but not overarching writer, and such grand judgments are only plausible many years,even decades, after one's death. While it's clear Gottfried believes the former to be the case, and I believe the latter, one virtue of his book is that I still can concede its excellence without endorsing the notion of Miller as the ultimate in any aspect, save that which appears on the back cover: as a concomitantly commercially successful, politically controversial, and romantically conspicuous celebrity at a noteworthy time and place.

Arthur Miller, once the ultimate celebrity.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One of the better books from an uneven biographer, March 23, 2005

By 

B. A Varkentine (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Arthur Miller: His Life And Work (Hardcover)

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wealth of information and insight into one man's life, November 17, 2003

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Arthur Miller: His Life And Work (Hardcover)

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.