Just Googling around after Miller.. A few snippets from below::
""In his final years, decrying the Bush administration and what he perceived as its blinkered, bullying foreign policy, Miller remained a citizen and a playwright of the world.""
""In 2002, Miller, accepting the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for lifetime achievement, delivered a lecture in which he took after Bush's global image.
"The truculent image," he said of Bush, "is exactly the wrong one, if what you want to convey is that you are not only a strong leader but a mature man of reason.""
"""He was in Chicago in 1968, he was at the forefront of the Vietnam-era antiwar movement, and during the Cold War, he was one of the great advocates for writers' freedom.""
""Miller proved a stouthearted champion of society's underdogs and outcasts, of real-life imprisoned dissident writers and of the fictional but indelible subjects found in his most provocative work.""
And the best of all::
"He took a much-maligned word, `liberal,' and defined it in the best sense as humanist, activist and artist."
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`Death of a Salesman' playwright Arthur Miller dies
BY MICHAEL PHILLIPS
Chicago Tribune
(KRT) - The man who wrote "Death of a Salesman" died Thursday. And as Linda Loman told the sons of Willy Loman, that sad and epic American dreamer: Attention must be paid.
Arthur Miller, 89, died in his home in Roxbury, Conn., surrounded by family, 56 years to the day after the Broadway opening of "Death of a Salesman."
He had suffered recent bouts with cancer, pneumonia and a heart condition. The cause was heart failure.
For nearly nine decades, that same heart served America's pre-eminent playwright valiantly and well, in an active, doggedly prolific career as playwright, essayist and activist.
Weathering critical disfavor at home in recent decades even as his star shone brightly overseas, Miller proved a stouthearted champion of society's underdogs and outcasts, of real-life imprisoned dissident writers and of the fictional but indelible subjects found in his most provocative work.
Across much of the 20th Century and into the 21st, Arthur Miller served as the major social conscience of the world stage.
In dramas as formidable and stylistically diverse as "All My Sons," "Death of a Salesman" and "The Crucible," Miller transformed post-World War II Broadway into a public arena for moral combat, engaging audiences with questions of personal responsibility and political life.
In Miller's first Broadway success, "All My Sons" (1947), the son of a middle-American industrialist and war profiteer reminds his mother that "there's a universe of people outside, and you're responsible to it." This became Miller's refrain throughout his career.
"He was the 20th Century," Goodman Theatre artistic director Robert Falls said Friday. "Every aspect of the century affected him: Two world wars, the Depression, the Cold War, the conservatism of our current times.
"He was in Chicago in 1968, he was at the forefront of the Vietnam-era antiwar movement, and during the Cold War, he was one of the great advocates for writers' freedom.
"He took a much-maligned word, `liberal,' and defined it in the best sense as humanist, activist and artist."
As Miller scholar and biographer Christopher Bigsby said Friday, "He was a private man whose conscience forced him to be a public man."
Late in Miller's career, Falls became a primary custodian of his work. Falls won a 1999 Tony Award for his Goodman revival of "Death of a Salesman," starring Brian Dennehy, which enjoyed huge success on Broadway and is being remounted, with Dennehy and a largely British cast, this spring in London.
Last year, Miller's final play, "Finishing the Picture," opened at the Goodman under Falls' direction.
The play was inspired by Miller's experiences on the set of "The Misfits," a film for which Miller wrote the screenplay and which starred Miller's then-wife, Marilyn Monroe. For a time, they were the most recognizable and star-dusted couple in the country - the owl and the pussycat, as one wag put it.
Miller's death, said "Angels in America" author Tony Kushner on Friday, is "a giant event. The big three (of the American stage) are, and always have been: Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller.
"And to have had Miller amongst us this long was amazing. It was such a gigantic life. No one occupied a role in American culture comparable to his."
In his final years, decrying the Bush administration and what he perceived as its blinkered, bullying foreign policy, Miller remained a citizen and a playwright of the world.
In 2002, Miller, accepting the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for lifetime achievement, delivered a lecture in which he took after Bush's global image.
"The truculent image," he said of Bush, "is exactly the wrong one, if what you want to convey is that you are not only a strong leader but a mature man of reason."
Miller's political views were well known through his collected essays. In recent decades, in fact, the essays and Miller's 1987 autobiography "Timebends: A Life" overshadowed much of his work for the stage.
Broadway marquees were scheduled to dim their lights Friday night. The symbolic gesture rings oddly hollow: Miller's final two plays, "Resurrection Blues" (2002), which premiered at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and "Finishing the Picture" (2004), which Falls staged at the Goodman, have yet to receive New York productions on or off Broadway.
Arthur Asher Miller was one of three children born to Polish-Jewish immigrants in New York City. His father, Isadore, owned a prosperous women's clothing concern, the Miltex Coat and Suit Company. His mother, Gittel ("Gussie") Miller, taught school.
In 1929, the stock market crash wiped out the company. A shaken and humbled Miller clan moved to Brooklyn. The psychic impact of the Depression informed all of Miller's writing.
To earn money for college, Miller worked as a warehouse loader and shipping clerk. In 1934, he traveled to Ann Arbor to attend the University of Michigan, where he worked on the school paper and began writing plays. Two of them won the Hopwood playwriting award.
In a 1953 essay, Miller recalled his Ann Arbor days as a time when he and his classmates, including his wife-to-be, Mary Slattery, "saw a new world coming every third morning." Miller added: "The place was full of speeches, meetings, and leaflets. It was jumping with issues."
As a fledgling novelist ("Focus," about anti-Semitism in America, became a film starring William H. Macy) and struggling playwright, Miller's meager income was supplanted by money provided by his brother, Kermit.
Tellingly, Miller's plays are full of uneasy and often guilt-ridden relationships between brothers, from "The Man Who Had All the Luck" (1944) to "All My Sons" (1947) to "Death of a Salesman" (1949) to "The Price" (1968).
Success didn't come easily or quickly to Miller. His first Broadway venture, "The Man Who Had All the Luck," handed the writer a six-performance flop.
"I was lucky," Miller once said. "I didn't get too famous too quick."
Miller's final play, "Finishing the Picture," came 70 years after his first collegiate efforts.
"(Miller's death) is quite startling," said Bigsby, director of the Arthur Miller Center in the American studies department of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. "That's a much longer career than Chekhov or Strindberg or Ibsen. And hearing of Miller's death is like hearing of the death of Chekhov.
"He is that significant."
The Broadway success of "All My Sons," a drama about a grimly compromised middle-American airplane parts manufacturer and his family, established Miller as a strong theatrical voice working in the well-made-play mode of Ibsen, one of his idols. The sins of the father in "All My Sons" cannot be hidden forever.
"He was always concerned with the connection of the past to the present," said Miller scholar Bigsby. "That's the spine of morality in his plays. Cause and effect. What happens has results and we must accept responsibility for those results."
With that first flush of success, however, Miller drew a literary lion's share of criticism. American anti-Communist groups successfully pressured the U.S. Army not to not to allow productions of "All My Sons," a harsh indictment of war-profiteering Americans, to be toured in postwar Europe.
Originally titled "The Inside of His Head," "Death of a Salesman" made Miller a rich man and a cultural figurehead - Abraham Lincoln with eyeglasses and a Brooklyn dialect.
Thanks in large part to director Elia Kazan's monumental original production, "Salesman" made audiences sob with grief. Miller was ambivalent about the emotional response to what he later called "seriously intentioned work."
The play won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize. Miller created an impressionistic portrait of a man, and a society, a little too in love with the Horatio Alger myth. A wonder of form, function and vivid anguish, the character of Willy Loman (based on Miller's salesman uncle, Manny) became the emblem of an economic system based on what Miller memorably called "a smile and a shoeshine."
It sounded anti-American to some, including New York Daily News gossip columnist Ed Sullivan (before he had his variety show).
Miller involved himself in many liberal causes throughout his adulthood. He signed a petition urging the abolishment of the Committee on Un-American Activities, in the early days of the communist hunting era.
This was at a time, as Miller biographer Martin Gottfried wrote in "Arthur Miller: His Life and Work," when the FBI made "few distinctions between (communist) party members, sympathizers, leftists and liberals."
With "The Crucible" (1953), Miller drew an implicit parallel between the 17th Century Salem witch trials and the anti-Communist witch hunts of his own time.
In 1956, Miller was asked to name names of Communist Party members or sympathizers by the House Un-American Activities Committee. (The Chicago Tribune, among other right-leaning papers, published an editorial urging Miller to name names.)
Unlike his colleague Kazan, the director of "All My Sons" and "Salesman," who gave the committee names and became an industry pariah, Miller told the committee: "My conscience will not permit me to use the name of another person."
For a brief, bruising time in the 1950s and early 1960s, Miller played an uncomfortably visible role of husband to Marilyn Monroe, paragon of glamorous Hollywood artifice.
His relationship with Monroe became the inspiration for two of his plays: "After the Fall" (1964) and his final work, "Finishing the Picture." The marriage took its toll on Miller's life and career. After the mid-1950s premiere of "A View From the Bridge," Miller was considered old-hat by many.
In his forays into drama criticism, Miller expressed bafflement at the respect accorded Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot." Years later, Miller acknowledged a change of heart on that play's worth.
For much of his career, Miller's critical reputation was far better outside America than in it. "I'm becoming invisible in my own land," he once said.
Miller scholar Bigsby explains it this way. "Tragedy sits rather uneasily in America, which is more about the pursuit of happiness." This is the theme of "Death of a Salesman," in which Willy Loman is undone by his belief in a capitalist society of glad-hands and small talk.
In a line that owed a lot to Clifford Odets, whose Group Theatre shows of the 1930s thrilled the budding playwright Miller, Willy pleads with the younger man about to fire him. "You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit."
More than personal insults and psychological breakdowns are at play here. "You can't make any sense of Arthur's work if you don't deal with the politics of his work," said Kushner, his own generation's pre-eminent leftist playwright. "He made sure of it in `Salesman.' Strip that one of its politics and it doesn't make any sense."
"Death of a Salesman," his most celebrated play, became "a burden" to Miller's career, Falls said. "No matter what else he wrote, it was compared to that play. In both his opinion and in mine, `Finishing the Picture' was both neglected and misunderstood critically. Like O'Neill and Williams, I think, Arthur suffered a lack of critical respect in this country, yet helped define serious American drama for the world."
He was no granite archetype, according to Falls.
"I expected to meet a figure off Mt. Rushmore. But he was a guy who rolled up his sleeves. He saw himself as a carpenter, and just as he'd go into his workroom and make chairs and tables - practical things people could use - he'd approach making a new play the same way.
"I used to joke with Arthur that most 89-year-old men couldn't stay awake in the theater, let alone stay engaged in the act of creating a play."
Miller married three times, most recently to the photographer Inge Morath, who died in 2002. Miller had two children, Jane Ellen and Robert, by his first wife. He and Morath had a son, Daniel, and one daughter, Rebecca.
In 2002, Rebecca Miller told the Chicago Tribune that her father was a "fantastic grandfather." And surprisingly, she said, given his reputation for fierce moral judgments, "he was totally non-judgmental."
An old friend and fellow progressive, Studs Terkel, said Friday, "He was a gifted man of the theater, but something else. He always spoke out. He spoke out for what he believed in, not only when it was unfashionable to speak out, but unsafe.
"Giftedness, and guts: Those are the words for this man."
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"Giftedness, and guts: Those are the words for this man."
What else can you say?
And so it goes...
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