Posted on 02/11/2005 7:33:51 AM PST by SoFloFreeper
ROXBURY, Conn. (AP) -- Award-winning author and playwright Arthur Miller has died.
NO URL YET.
Playwright Arthur Miller's assistant says he has died at age 89.
ROXBURY, Conn. (AP) -- Arthur Miller, the Pulitzer prize-winning playwright whose most famous fictional creation, Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman," came to symbolize the American Dream gone awry, has died, his assistant said Friday. He was 89.
Miller died Thursday evening, said his assistant, Julia Bolus.
Miller was 89.
His best-known works include "The Crucible" and "Death of a Salesman."
Miller was once married to actress Marilyn Monroe.
Sad to hear it.
I wonder how many of the Obits are going to use "Death of a Salesman" in the title.
Nobody is writing Plays like him anymore.
A Conference in New York
In March 1949, New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel played host to one of the strangest gatherings in American history. Less than four years after Allied troops had liberated Hitler's concentration camps, 800 prominent literary and artistic figures congregated in the Waldorf to call for peace at any price with Stalin, whose own gulag had just been restocked with victims of his latest purge. Americans, including Lillian Hellman, Aaron Copland, Arthur Miller, and a young Norman Mailer, joined with European and Soviet delegates to repudiate "US warmongering." Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich told the delegates that "a small clique of hatemongers" was preparing a global conflagration; he urged progressive artists to struggle against the new "Fascists'' who were seeking world domination. American panelists echoed the Russian composer's fear of a new conflict. Playwright Clifford Odets denounced the ``enemies of Man'' and claimed the United States had been agitated into ``a state of holy terror'' by fraudulent reports of Soviet aggression; composer Copland declared "the present policies of the American Government will lead inevitably into a third world war."
The Waldorf conference marked another step in the Communist Information Bureau's (Cominform) campaign to shape Western opinion. A series of Soviet-sponsored cultural conferences beginning in September 1948 called for world peace and denounced the policies of the Truman administration. The conference at the Waldorf-Astoria, however, was the first to convene in a Western country and, not coincidentally, was also the first to meet organized and articulate opposition.
The Cominform could hardly have picked a riskier place than New York City to stage a Stalinist peace conference. New York's large ethnic neighborhoods were filled with refugees from Communism, and its campuses and numerous cultural and political journals employed hundreds of politically left-leaning men and women who had fought in the ideological struggles over Stalinism that divided American labor unions, college faculties, and cultural organizations before World War II.
Stealing the Show
A handful of liberal and socialist writers, led by philosophy professor Sydney Hook, saw their chance to steal a little of the publicity expected for the Waldorf peace conference. A fierce ex-Communist himself, Hook was then teaching at New York University and editing a socialist magazine called The New Leader. Ten years earlier he and his mentor John Dewey had founded a controversial group called the Committee for Cultural Freedom, which attacked both Communism and Nazism. He now organized a similar committee to harass the peace conference in the Waldorf-Astoria.
R.I.P. I was hoping he would make it to 90. A true living legend. Saul Bellow can still do it though.
ping
The first time I saw Death of a Salesman was on Television staring Dustin Hoffman and John Malkovich. It blew me away.
Miller died Thursday night at his home in Roxbury of heart failure, his assistant, Julia Bolus, said Friday. His family was at his bedside, she said.
His plays, with their strong emphasis on family, morality and personal responsibility, spoke to the growing fragmentation of American society.
"A lot of my work goes to the center of where we belong -- if there is any root to life -- because nowadays the family is broken up, and people don't live in the same place for very long," Miller said in a 1988 interview. "Dislocation, maybe, is part of our uneasiness. It implants the feeling that nothing is really permanent."
Miller's career was marked by early success. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for "Death of a Salesman" in 1949, when he was just 33 years old.
His marriage to screen star Marilyn Monroe in 1956 further catapulted the playwright to fame, though that was publicity he said he never pursued.
In a 1992 interview with a French newspaper, he called her "highly self-destructive" and said that during their marriage, "all my energy and attention were devoted to trying to help her solve her problems. Unfortunately, I didn't have much success."
"Death of a Salesman," which took Miller only six weeks to write, earned rave reviews when it opened on Broadway in February 1949, directed by Elia Kazan.
The story of Willy Loman, a man destroyed by his own stubborn belief in the glory of American capitalism and the redemptive power of success, was made into a movie and staged all over the world.
"I couldn't have predicted that a work like `Death of a Salesman' would take on the proportions it has," Miller said in 1988. "Originally, it was a literal play about a literal salesman, but it has become a bit of a myth, not only here but in many other parts of the world."
In 1999, 50 years after it won the Tony Award as best play, "Death of a Salesman" won the Tony for best revival of the Broadway season. The show also won the top acting prize for Brian Dennehy, who played Loman.
Miller, then 83, received a lifetime achievement award. "Just being around to receive it is a pleasure," he joked to the audience during the awards ceremony.
Miller won the New York Drama Critics' Circle's best play award twice in the 1940s, for "All My Sons" in 1947 and for "Death of a Salesman." In 1953, he received a Tony Award for "The Crucible," a play about mass hysteria during the Salem witch trials that was inspired by the repressive political environment of McCarthyism.
That play, still read by thousands of American high-school students each year, is Miller's most frequently performed work.
LOL....I didn't know he was alive....I HAD to read "Death of a Salesman" in my Junior year in High School.....all I remember is how DEPRESSING it was.....kinda like most of the top rated movies and books today always are....and WHY I don't read/see them!
Another one of Norma-Jean's benefactors heads for the happy hunting grounds. He did some good work. RIP.
Harold Bloom called 'Death of a Salesman' a post-Ibsen rewrite of King Lear. Many of Miller's generation had flirtations with communism. I hope he's not reduced to that unfortunate aspect of his life.
Yeah, that sure is great art, all right.
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