The Theater: New Plays in Manhattan, Feb. 21, 1949

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What materially shrinks the play itself is the actual writing, the inadequate artistry. By never flinching before his story, by slowly, relentlessly lugging it forward, Miller gets from it a full human effect. And inside Jo Mielziner's usefully lean set, everything moves around easily between past and present, dream world and reality. But the idea of the play is everywhere more moving than the play itself. Death of a Salesman too often circles round & round where it should soar, or swoop; it contains more illustrative scenes than a true artist would need, more explicit statements than he would countenance. Most crucially of all, Death of a Salesman—whose distinction it is to be less an indictment than an elegy—is written as solid, sometimes stolid, prose. To its credit, it has almost no fake poetry; but it has no real poetry either.

That it does have dramatic sharpness is due to a very well-handled production. Sound performers—Lee J. Cobb as Willy, Mildred Dunnock as his wife, Arthur Kennedy as his older son, Howard Smith as his friend—play well together; and a brilliant director, Elia Kazan, gives the whole thing edge and shape. Thanks to Kazan, a deeply human story catches the special resonance of the stage.

Now a solid front-ranker among young U.S. playwrights, Arthur Miller took last week's success with caution. When a friend said that he had "arrived," Miller protested: "You never arrive, really. There's always the next one. . . Anybody in this business who thinks he's an expert is kidding himself."

A lanky, relaxed man with a gaunt Lincolnesque face, Playwright Miller, son of a coat manufacturer, played high-school football in Brooklyn, worked as shipping clerk, truck driver and dishwasher to raise his tuition at the University of Michigan. There he met Classmate Mary Slattery. They were married in 1940 and have two children.

"I'm interested in tragedy," says Miller. "I want to discover the ordinary man in the extreme of crisis." To keep up with the ordinary man, to store up "a usable past" and to avoid the "inbreeding, hyper-sophistication and emotional anemia" that beset successful writers, Miller still likes to take such occasional jobs of manual labor as steam fitting in a shipyard. His last job (1947) was putting together wooden slats for beer cases in a Brooklyn box factory.

His first major success came in 1945 with Focus, an angry novel about antiSemitism, which sold 90,000 copies. He wrote it on the rebound from his first Broadway play, a flop called The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944). He had tried Hollywood briefly ("like swimming in a sea of gumdrops") and for three years wrote for radio ("like playing a scene in a dark closet").

Then he decided to try just once more in the precarious theater ("it's a sort of floating crap game"). For two years, off & on, he labored over a script; the result, All My Sons, won the Drama Critics' Award in 1947. He tapped a suddenly booming bank account to buy such simple luxuries as a two-family Brooklyn brownstone house and the materials for a one-room Connecticut cottage, which he built himself.