Arthur Miller became an overnight sensation in 1947 with the premiere of his landmark play Death of a Salesman. Now, eighty years later, his fame is undiminished. Lists of the best American playwrights routinely include him, sometimes as number one, and his plays continue to receive major productions. In 2026 alone, we’ve seen Death of a Salesman—starring Nathan Lane — in New York, and multiple productions of The Crucible, including one in Dublin.
Christopher Bigsby, a UK-based professor of American Studies, published an acclaimed biography of Arthur Miller in 2010, which clocked in at 749 pages. That work inspired this followup, The Arthur Miller Tapes: A Life in His Own Words, which is written in the form of an interview between Miller and Bigsby. It’s a brilliant success. Bigsby commands an astonishing amount of granular knowledge of Miller’s life and work; his probing questions prompt thoughtful reflections and revelations by the playwright, and the question and answer format makes it possible to read Miller’s own words as he muses about his background, beliefs, politics, family, and, of course, theater.
The book also creates a detailed impression of Miller and his long life. He was twelve years old when the stock market crashed, and the aftermath made such an impact that it became a central theme in some of his plays (The Price, The American Clock). In high school, he was already attracted to Russian classics by authors including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov. After he graduated from the University of Michigan, he wrote a play for radio, and its success emboldened him to consider playwriting as a career. The rest is history: his dramas about personal and moral responsibility have become enduring classics.
Miller was conflicted about his Jewish identity. He considered himself “an atheist…because it is an ultimate absurdity, the idea of God, after the Holocaust.” Yet he also avowed that “in some way I do think that God is Jewish. The idea is profoundly Jewish.” He also supported the creation of the State of Israel, imagining that Jews and Arabs would share the land peacefully. He died in 2005 at the age of eighty nine.
This fascinating and absorbing book confirms Arthur Miller’s preeminence as a thinker, an artist, and an observer of American life.
Bob Goldfarb is President Emeritus of Jewish Creativity International.
