Andrew O'Hagan writes:

Bigsby’s biography is so effective because it manages to locate Miller’s art in terms both of the progression of his idealism and the regressions of his actual experience. There can’t be many writers who appeared to live so much at the centre of their times and who suffered so much from that seeming centrality. Miller already had an FBI file on leaving the University of Michigan and his literary ambition was always tied to a more or less covert desire for societal change. Despite the efforts of the House Committee on Un-American Activities to stamp him as a Party member, all they could turn up, in the end, was a 1940s application form with no signature. (His signature, more maddeningly for the HUAC, appeared on every other petition raised in that period.) Miller was, in fact, like so many in those years, a sort-of-Marxist committed primarily to self-discovery and the ousting of Fascism, and the plays, where they are at their best, survive as artworks more for the self-discovery than the anti-Fascism. Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge and After the Fall are powered by vibrant political analogies, but their essence lies deep in their understanding of what is personal in America. Willy Loman is a grandson of Tom Sawyer, just as John Proctor is a kinsman of the upholders of the Scarlet Letter: they are each sons of the singer of himself in Walt Whitman, or of the powerful American addressee, Ishmael. Loman bears a relation to the figment and self-projection that is Jay Gatsby, as much as to that newly self-aware, post-immigrant landlubber Augie March.

(LRB 1 January 2009)

Weidenfeld | hardback 739 pp. |ISBN: 9780297854418