Newspaper Article

ARTHUR MILLER: A LIFE TIMEBENDS: A LIFE BY ARTHUR MILLER GENERAL, $34.95

Robertson, Rosalind

1988

Overview

[ARTHUR MILLER] was born in 1915. His father, one of a large family, had come to New York from Poland in the 1880s and became a successful businessman. By the time Miller was ready for university, the Depression had forced the Millers out of their comfortable Harlem apartment overlooking Central Park into a tiny house in Brooklyn. Their prosperity, which had allowed dreams of West Point and protected Miller's childhood from the racism and bigotry he would later meet, was gone. So Miller worked his way through the University of Michigan without financial help from home. Then, in 1944, came Miller's first Broadway production, The Man Who Had All The Luck. After its very brief run, Miller published nothing for three years beyond his only novel, Focus. In 1947 All My Sons appeared. With this Broadway production, about an industrialist who sells defective airplane parts to the army, Miller established his name, winning the Drama Critics Circle Award and a \"new freedom to create.\" But it also drove Miller, like Tolstoy before him, to take a menial job in a beer-box factory, feeling his identification with life's failures menaced by his success. The job lasted a week. Since 1962, Miller has been married to Inge Morath, an Austrian photographer who survived the Nazis and later worked with Cartier- Bresson and Gjon Mili; and in describing the impassioned arguments between Inge's mentors, Miller introduces some of the endless, elusive humor with which Timebends is leavened. Inge is the mother of Miller's youngest child, Rebecca. In the final part of Timebends Miller says, \"Marriage is a case of mutual forgiveness.\" Time has perhaps tempered idealism.

• Publisher: Postmedia Network Inc
• Subject: Miller, Arthur / Monroe, Marilyn / Morath, Inge