Arthur Miller: American Witness

New Yorker critic Lahr (Tennessee Williams) shines in this searching account of the life of playwright Arthur Miller (1915–2005). Lahr’s vivid portrait begins with Miller’s youth, first in Harlem then Brooklyn, as an underachieving student who couldn’t get into college. Miller was eventually accepted to the University of Michigan, where his enrollment was contingent on him having $500 in savings; when that was drained, Miller risked expulsion until he entered a university writing competition with a cash prize in 1936. For reasons unclear even to Miller, he decided to write a play, No Villains, which won second place and set him on a path to greatness. The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944) became his “first play to open on Broadway,” and All My Sons, three years later, earned him acclaim ahead of the 1949 debut of Death of a Salesman (which is performed almost every day somewhere, Lahr notes). Lahr elucidates Miller’s creative process, and discusses how Marilyn Monroe stirred his imagination (he wrote her into an unfinished play after their first encounter) and his choice to challenge McCarthyism with The Crucible. Lahr’s at his best using small moments to illuminate his subject, as when the 16-year-old Miller realized the depths of his father’s impoverishment when his father asked him for a quarter to pay his subway fare. It’s a great introduction to a giant of American letters. (Nov.)