Arthur Miller, 1915-1962, by Christopher Bigsby
Arthur Miller was born in 1915 in Jewish Harlem, the son of immigrants from the shtetl, enjoying comfortable family wealth until his father’s business collapsed. The key events in forming his political outlook were the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, the Cold War — and the slow-to-dawn truth about Stalinism. The ever-present corollary is ‘New York Jew’. At the outset of a biography encompassing the man and his work, Christopher Bigsby points up Miller’s recurring debt to the classical Greek theatre, ‘where a society could engage with its myths, its animating principles.’
Tall and strong, Miller remarkably was never conscripted during the second world war. Wishing to join the Navy, he was classified 4F by the Selective Service Board because of a weakened wrist incurred playing college football and ‘a stiffening of the right knee joint’.
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