Arthur Miller died in 2005 at the age of 89, and the reactions were not universally of grief. Lights were dimmed on Broadway and one paper cleared its front page, but several dissenters made themselves heard over the empty rituals of public praise. The most famous of America’s playwrights had always called forth divided reactions from critics and public, and reactions after his death were in keeping with that.

Actually, it’s the dissenters who made him so famous because they kept him in the public eye with their criticism all his life, and now beyond. Only when able to produce work provoking enough to be both criticized and defended a writer becomes famous in publishers’ eyes and therefore news worthy. From a marketing point of view, Miller had done everything right.

The author Christopher Bigsby is director of the Arthur Miller Centre at the University of East Anglia. He was and is a constant and staunch defender of Miller, therefore the biography out of his hands is no great surprise. Covering the years from 1915 to 1962, it ends with Miller’s divorce from Marilyn Monroe.

Miller had granted Bigsby access to his papers prior to his death, and the biography will be a standard work for future scholars in its wealth of detail and data. On the down side, it is completely one sided and uncritical; future scholars will be able to use it as a reference book and a timetable to work with, but the real work has still to be done.

No doubt, Bigsby is already working on the sequel from 1963 to 1989, but his decision to end in 1962 lets him off at least one major hook he will face in the second part: The play After The Fall of 1964, where Miller tried to cash in on his former wife’s suicide.

It also helps him out of the quandary over Miller’s personality as well. Miller behaviour as a private person is simply indefensible, and Bigsby tries just that. I think this is the major flaw of this book. How could you defend a serial adulterer in his first marriage cashing in on his second wife’s death? What about the son of his third wife born with Down’s syndrome, shunted off to an institution and then forgotten? Miller’s autobiography doesn’t even mention the boy.

Wives and children were only second rate to Miller’s career. By even trying to defend him, Bigsby shows him up even more as a cold and ruthless person. It might be that the essence of his work would not have been possible if he had functioned as a husband and father. As it is, that question must remain open.

Bigsby bails himself out by going into the House of Un-American Activities Committee at the end of the book. But Miller’s refusal to name names before HUAC in 1956 was a major feat. To stand up against fascist McCarthy in a fascistoid American society was brave and praiseworthy. But it is no redeeming point in my view.

Miller had dug himself into these hearings himself with his play The Crucible, the 1953 play about the Salem witch trials. In it, he draws a clear parallel between McCarthy paranoid fear of Communists and hysteria that led to the witch hunts in 17^th century Massachusetts. In hind sight there would be better parallels to draw on, especially if you follow the permanent shady dealings of the CIA still going on.

The play angered some fascist critics so much, that they regularly put down Miller’s plays as bad on the grounds that it was from Miller, rather than on intrinsic merit or lack thereof. Bigsby has made his homework in this section rather well and names these critics plus showing them up as paid pawns of the CIA.