Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140249176 ISBN 13: 9780140249170

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1995

Telling his life story with humor and passion--displaying throughout the largeness of spirit that has made him one of the most admired writers this country has ever produced--Miller recalls his boyhood, his education, the formation of his political outlook, his career successes and failures, and the remarkable variety of people, both obscure and famous, in his life.

From AudioFile:

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Miller has recorded excerpts from his six-hundred page autobiography. Miller is easy to listen to; his thick, warm voice has a slightly gravelly sound. He reads, rather than acts out, the details of his fascinating life, but he's expressive and appropriately impassioned. Al-though the tape starts with the playwright's Brooklyn childhood, it then jumps to The Death of a Salesman and then to The Crucible, leaving out any events in between. The title is very apt. A.A.B. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Publishers Weekly:

America's most famous living playwright (All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, Incident at Vichy, etc.) here does with his life story what nature does with rock strata, folding it back on itself to achieve the effects of many-layered richness and simultaneity that he aims for in his plays. It's a life as remarkable for its commitment as its achievement. Growing up on the edge of Harlem in the '20s and '30s, the son of a successful but semiliterate coat manufacturer, Miller discovered both his vocation and his leftist political convictions during the Depression and the rise of fascism. He achieved a moral victory against McCarthyism in the '50s; and it was under his presidency that PEN went from an ineffectual literary club to a real force for international freedom of expression. While covering these events, Miller traces the genesis of his plays in his life experience, provides vivid portraits of a host of notables in the worlds of theater, cinema and politics, including Elia Kazan, Lee and Paula Strasberg, John Huston, Clark Gable, Sir Laurence Olivier, John F. Kennedy and Mikhail Gorbachev, and a detailed, deeply touching one of his second wife, Marilyn Monroe, who finally slipped from his reach. Tough, compassionate, bristling with intelligence and profound reflections on the dramas of life and stage, this is one of the memorable autobiographies of our time. Photos. BOMC selection.
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