Death of a genius

Very, very sad. One of my favorite American writers, Arthur Miller, has died of congestive heart failure. He was 89. What's to say? He can only be described with superlatives. The "giant of U.S. theater". One of the three great American playwrights of the 20th century - beside Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams. A genius writer who insisted on making us think throughout his nine decades, his dozens of plays and screenplays, his memoirs and countless essays. "Death of a Salesman", which won him a Pulitzer, was Miller's best known work. The voices of his characters insisted: Willy and Linda Loman, Joe Carbone, Chris Keller, John and Elizabeth Proctor. "It's like a major planet has been removed from the sky," says actor Brian Dennehy, who played Willy Loman.

I like the following Miller quotes, taken from a 2003 interview with Esquire magazine:

What I'm doing is helping reality out. To complete itself. I'm giving it a hand. But there's some piece of reality that is a reported reality that it hangs on. It does hang on it.

A lot of my work goes to the center of where we belong - if there is any root to life - because nowadays the family is broken up, and people don't live in the same place for very long. Dislocation, maybe, is part of our uneasiness. It implants the feeling that nothing is really permanent.

I could write about failure only because I could deal with it. Most of my work before Death of a Salesman, 98 percent of it was a failure. By the time Willy Loman came along, I knew how he felt.

Whenever I hear somebody's in touch with God, I look for the exit.

The only thing that I am reasonably sure of is that anybody who's got an ideology has stopped thinking.

I believe in work. If somebody doesn't create something, however small it may be, he gets sick. An awful lot of people feel that they're treading water—that if they vanished in smoke, it wouldn't mean anything at all in this world. And that's a despairing and destructive feeling. It'll kill you.

To write any kind of imaginary work, you gotta fall on your sword. You gotta be ready to be blasted out of existence. Lots of times, the blood is on the floor.

Plus: Miller's life, his major works, his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, his moral, notes to his play "Death Of A Salesman", his autobiography - and some photos.