Arthur Miller 1916-2005

Arthur Miller 1915-2005

What a wonderful writer Arthur Miller was. I still vividly remember reading (aloud) The Crucible, his play about the Salem witch trials (but actually about the McCarthy era), in seventh grade. I read the part of John Proctor, and it had a great impact on me. Death of a Salesman could well be the great American play, and he wrote other classics as well. He wrote film scripts (The Misfits), essays and short stories. He won the Pulitzer Prize. All that, and married to a suicidal "sex symbol" -- I think he was once called "the hardest working husband in America."

"Reminiscing about Monroe in his 1987 autobiography, Timebends: A Life, Miller lamented that she was rarely taken seriously as anything but a sex symbol. 'To have survived, she would have had to be either more cynical or even further from reality than she was,' he wrote. 'Instead, she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.' "

He will be missed.