Arthur Miller, RIP: 1915-2005

At 89, Arthur Miller had been dating a woman 34 years old (55 years his junior), reminiscing about life, and was acerbic and still recalling the many high points of his life. He was also receiving treatments for some type of cancer which, today, claimed its victory.

Some of his notable achievements: a Pulitzer-winning playwright, who penned, among other classics, Death of A Salesman (which opened in 1949) and The Crucible, the latter an allegory inspired by the witch hunt that was McCarthyism. Miller not only resisted the pressure to point fingers at his colleagues: he lambasted the House Committee on Un-American Activities and responded with The Crucible, a play set among the lunacy that was the Salem Witch Trials, and which was a thinly-veiled allegory of (then) contemporary America.

In addition to his plays, Miller married Marilyn Monroe, although as he later admitted, "all my energy and attention were devoted to trying to help her solve her problems. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much success."

Like George Orwell's Animal Farm and Leon Uris's Mila 18, both The Crucible and Death of A Salesman not only exemplify excellence in craft, they effortlessly manage to entertain on a number of levels, depending on when the reader/viewer absorbs the material. Specifically, The Crucible, on its surface, is a tale about Salem's residents and the hysteria, fear and accusations which tear apart a peaceful, friendly town. Against the backdrop of Joseph McCarthy's branding of a variety of Americans as Communists, however, the play serves to remind the reader/viewer that the political climate in this country at the time was as chaotic, pernicious and paranoid as was the climate of Salem in the era of "The Witches."

Death of A Salesman purports to be a story about Willy Loman's fading life and dreams, but with Willy's decline, so Miller portrays the story of the American Dream against the onset of competition, modernization, technology and obsolescence. Like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, but on a much smaller scale, Death of A Salesman peels back the shiny coat of Americana that invited tens of thousands to instant success on these shores and portrays the reality of what many failed to notice, and what many more were unwilling to acknowledge.

At 89, Miller had achieved all, or almost all, the recognition a playwright could achieve, and his life was "well-lived" and long. Yet knowing he is gone still serves to remind us that his craft, his focus and his creativity might be equaled but never surpassed.