Hi ionesco,
Another great man of people and words moved on.
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Arthur Miller: a giant of American theatre
2 hours, 17 minutes ago U.S. National - AFP
NEW YORK (AFP) - Playwright Arthur Miller, who died on Thursday at age 89, won international acclaim for works such as the "Death of a Salesman" and "The Crucible" that tapped into the malaise of post-war America and the hunt for suspected communists.
AFP/File Photo
Reuters
Slideshow: Playwright Arthur Miller Dies at 89
Miller led a colourful and controversial career that included a well-publicised romance with starlet Marilyn Monroe and bitter squabbles over his links to the Communist party in the United States.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author died on Thursday night in the Connecticut farmhouse he bought with Monroe in 1958, his sister Joan Copeland told AFP.
Despite decades of success, however, Miller remained preoccupied with the question of failure and personal tragedy in the American working class -- a theme etched into his soul growing up in the midst of the Great Depression.
Even sympathetic critics often saw his work as a nearly Marxist critique of American capitalism, and his greatest plays portrayed "average" men and women ground down by an unforgiving system of business and politics.
The son of Jewish immigrants of Polish origin, Miller was born in New York on October 17, 1915.
His early years were marked by the desperation of his father, whose garment business collapsed amid the Depression, and the physical, moral and financial strains those difficult years placed on society at large.
After university in Michigan, Miller returned to New York and his first play, "The Man Who Had All The Luck," opened in 1944.
The play, about a financially successful man who is nevertheless unhappy, presaged one of the great themes of his life's work, but was met with scathing reviews.
Two years later, however, his first Broadway production, "All My Sons," marked his first success. The play, about a businessman who sells defective parts to the US military, touched a chord with post-war American audiences.
But it was "Death of Salesman" in 1949 that established Miller's career.
The story of Willy Loman, a failed businessman who looks back on his life before killing himself to leave insurance money for his son, was compared to Dostoevsky and Shakespeare, and won the Pulitzer Prize.
The tale of Loman's desire to end up "number-one" -- and his son's rejection of that desire as "all wrong" -- ran for hundreds of performances and was translated into dozens of languages. It made Miller an instant millionaire.
The third of his major works, 1953's "The Crucible," looked back for inspiration to the earliest days of America in dramatising the infamous witch-hunts of Salem, Massachusetts in the 17th century.
But contemporary audiences clearly saw Miller's true meaning in the play, which was a searing indictment of American paranoias about the spread of Communism in the United States -- and, yet again, the tale of ordinary lives ruined.
Life appeared to then imitate art as three years later Miller was summoned before the House Committee on Un-American Activities which was seeking to purge Hollywood of suspected "reds" during the so-called McCarthy era.
Miller sat before the panel after director, Elia Kazan, testified Miller had attended Communist meetings.
The playwright's conviction for contempt of Congress -- he declined to name names of others -- was overturned but the personal strain remained. His turbulent front-page marriage to Monroe, the pin-up girl of her day, was short-lived.
Apart from "After The Fall," about Monroe, later decades saw him produce little of note as Miller drifted away from his trademark themes. But Miller also found lasting love with photographer Inge Morath, who died in 2002.
After the economic boom of the 1980s, Miller's work touched a new generation as both revivals and new plays brought him a second wave of success with American audiences. He also remained a committed political activist.
Even sceptics like leading critic Robert Brustein, who decades later sniffed at Miller's "plight of the exploited common man," was appreciative of the playwright's emotional power in depicting the difficult bonds of family.
Miller won many major artistic awards in the United States, including the National Medal of the Arts, and his work was hailed as a watershed, bringing a stinging humanist realism to the American stage.
He leaves a daughter, Rebecca, an actress and writer who is married to the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, as well as grandchildren.
story.news.yahoo.com
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IMO, all the greatest men and women of the arts and letters were first and foremost of the common people. Strong in spirit and persona..
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