ENG: The Crucible and the McCarthy Era
Course Guide
Arthur Miller by
An insightful study of Arthur Miller's work.
Arthur Miller by
Arthur Miller has been delivering powerful drama to the stage for decades with such masterpieces as Death of a Salesman . But, remarkably, no one has yet told the full story of Miller's own extraordinary life-a rich life, much of it shrouded from public view. To achieve this groundbreaking portrait of the artist and the man, the award-winning drama critic and biographer Martin Gottfried masterfully draws on his interviews with those who have known Miller throughout his personal and professional life, on Miller's voluminous lifelong correspondence, and on the annotated scripts and notebooks that reveal Miller's creative process in stunning detail. From Miller's childhood and adolescence in Depression-era New York City to his formative college years in Michigan…from the numerous early professional rejections to the 1947 play All My Sons that established him as a voice to be reckoned with…from his heroic defiance of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy years to his most unlikely pairing with Marilyn Monroe… from political and social activism on the world stage to an extraordinary professional vitality even as he turns 88 in October 2003 (he is still writing plays, and stage revivals and film adaptations of his classics proliferate): here is a dazzling book-a literary event of the first order.
On Politics and the Art of Acting by
Ronald Reagan might have been the first professional actor elected president, but as Arthur Miller reminds us in his delightfully acerbic, On Politics and the Art of Acting, Reagan was by no means the only actor to occupy the White House in modern times. Beginning with our latest farcical election, Miller considers the twin arts of acting and politics in our brave new Age of Entertainment and contrasts the relatively poor thespian skills of presidential candidates Bush and Gore with the consummate art practiced by some of the great masters of the modern American political stage: Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At once witty, wise, and deeply provocative, On Politics and the Art of Actingis essential reading for Arthur Miller's fans and anyone seriously interested in the American political scene.