Death+of+A+Salesman


 * __[|PDF Link to Death of a Salesman Text]__**


 * __Newish Arthur Miller Biography__** - Read the linked review of a 2005 Miller biography - the review provides an interesting synopses of the biography itself, and it references most of the issues we've talked about in class. Notice Miller's response to Marilyn Monroe's death...it reminded me of a line from a //Macbeth// soliloquy - I wonder if it will strike you the same way. Be prepared to discuss the article in class on our return from vacation. [|Miller Biography]

[|Joyce Carol Oates Essay] [|Searchable Concordance] [|Columbia Journal of American Studies Critique]


 * __The Man Who Had All the Luck__** - Here's a link to a review in The London Times for one of Miller's earliest works, [|"The Man Who Had All The Luck."] It's particularly interesting, as the main character is billed as essentially the opposite of Willy Loman, yet he, too, manages to be miserable. I'll see if I can find a copy of the play. When you go to the link to read the review, look at the animal rights advertisement on the right side of the page. I guess they still do bear-baiting in England... be ready to discuss on Monday what elements of "Death of a Salesman" seem to echo the ideas in "The Man Who Had All the Luck."

Miller Biography Review if link dead

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 = Now Miller's tale leaps off the page = A major new biography reveals two sides to the play wright: the romantic lover and the hero of the McCarthy era says Vanessa Thorpe [|Arthur Miller] 's compulsive desire to become 'a man of letters' was not a retreat from the real world. Though the surviving image of the playwright is as a tweedy, bespectacled aesthete, he was not a writer who lived vicariously through the page, expressing imagined truths about politics and love from Parnassian heights. Instead he distilled the horrors and regrets of his own life and of those around him to create his art. Christopher Bigsby's lengthy, sympathetic study contains electrifying new perspectives on its subject. In 2005, just before Miller died, he gave Bigsby boxes and boxes of previously unseen material. Some held manuscripts that had never been published, either because they fell short of Miller's daunting standards or because they were rejected before he became famous. Professor Bigsby, who was a close friend as well as a student of Miller's, clearly feels the hand of history on his shoulder. Not only must he give a definitive take on this great writer but he has had unrivalled access to the key primary source - not the boxes of papers but the man himself. We learn for the first time, for instance, that Miller's fiery criticisms of racism predated the rise of the civil- rights movement in America. Other surprises are less scholarly - just facts washed away by time, such as the revelation that the young Arthur was a promising crooner, briefly billed as a new Al Jolson. Photographs of the muscular Miller in a white T-shirt come as something of a shock too. Shown sitting in the wooden writing shack he had built, Miller is emphatically part of a macho, visceral tradition of American writing. An early encounter with a nameless male student in Coney Island in 1932 proves influential. He introduced Miller to the concepts of Marxism, explaining the Depression in Communist terms. 'Having been raised to feel that it was better to be a boss than a worker, Miller now met someone who suggested that it was quite the other way round,' writes Bigsby. His politicisation would survive the attritions of the McCarthy era intact. Miller's masterpiece, Death of a Salesman, was a response to his father's painful commercial failures but it was also the product of a bitter, cheated era, a generation who felt, as Edmund Wilson once noted, that from 1931 on America had 'bet on capitalism' and lost. But it was The Crucible, now such an established text, that proved both the high point and the undoing of Miller as an American institution. Bigsby details the McCarthy-inspired paranoia that consumed the creative community and threatened Miller too. The play, he argues, emerged as much out of Miller's guilty betrayal of his first wife, Mary Slattery, as it did out of the political witchhunt going on, but this did not lessen its consequences. It was inspired by the famous Salem witch trial, which culminated in the hanging in 1692 of 19 men and women and two dogs in eastern Massachusetts. When Miller first told the wife of his friend the director Elia Kazan that he was working on a play about witches he could tell by her odd reaction that Kazan was planning to 'name names'. In contrast, Miller's own behaviour was heroic. His defiant speech to the House Un-American Activities Committee echoed the words of The Crucible's John Proctor. 'When I say this I want you to understand that I am not protecting the Communists of the Communist Party. I am trying to, and I will, protect my sense of myself. I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him... I take responsibility for everything I have ever done but I cannot take responsibility for another human being.' Bigsby also reveals for the first time who Miller was protecting: 'The man he was now prepared to name, 45 years after the HUAC hearings, was the writer Millard Lampell, who he had first met through his radio work. The other was Lampell's wife.' Lampell was a Jewish writer and entertainer who sang in a group with Woody Guthrie. HUAC already had their names, of course, and both Lampell and Guthrie had their work supply cut off because of their Communist sympathies. After that, simply acting in one of Miller's plays was enough to get you blacklisted. Bigsby cites the testimony of Madeleine Sherwood, who had played Abigail in The Crucible: 'Your friends would cross the street so that they wouldn't have to say hello to you ... good people.' Though Marilyn Monroe does not sashay in from the wings until two-thirds of the way through the book, her effect is no less explosive. The pair met at a Los Angeles party in 1951 and made an instant and dangerous connection. Returning to New York, Miller 'felt like a man who had escaped the fire'. Elia Kazan recalls receiving letters that were ostensibly about script revisions but that ran 'on in the most rapturous tone about certain feelings he'd been having, awake and asleep, dreams of longing'. In Kazan's estimation, Miller 'didn't read like the constricted man I'd known'. Their sensational and sudden marriage unravelled almost as soon as it began when the writer realised he would be swamped by the actress's insecurities. 'I wasn't prepared for what I should have been prepared for, which was that she had literally no inner resources,' Miller said later, while Monroe commented that she felt she had let down her new husband - who believed her an 'angel' - by showing the 'ugly' side of herself. The sensitive, bedazzled Miller-in-love stands in contrast to the rigorous intellectual, but he is no less convincing. The two sides of the man unite in the playwright's brittle response to the news of Marilyn's death, years after they had parted. It was, he said, 'inevitable'. He would not go to the funeral, he added, because 'she won't be there'. Miller, it's clear, was not a dry, cerebral naive but a principled, passionate talent, who recognised imperfection in himself and in others. The man who emerges from these pages is more of a showman than is usually credited and more of a modern hero, too.
 * [[image:http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/5/1/1367419199456/Vanessa-Thorpe.jpg width="60" height="60" caption="Vanessa Thorpe" link="http://www.theguardian.com/profile/vanessathorpe"]]
 * [|Vanessa Thorpe]
 * [|The Observer], Saturday 13 December 2008
 * [|The Observer], Saturday 13 December 2008
 * 1) **Arthur Miller**
 * 2) by Christopher Bigsby
 * 3) [|Buy Arthur Miller from the Guardian bookshop] " class="bookstore-widget-picture-link">[[image:http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Books/Pix/covers/2008/12/11/arthurmiller140.jpg width="140" height="212"]]
 * 4) Buy the book Buy Arthur Miller from the Guardian bookshop"/>