Arthur Miller

Miller wrote plays about men who believed the deal they had made with America and then watched the deal fail them. He found that subject fast and held it: All My Sons in 1947, Death of a Salesman in 1949, The Crucible in 1953, A View from the Bridge in 1955. Four plays in nine years, and a permanent place in the American repertory. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and Death of a Salesman is still routinely argued over as the best American play of its century.

What he was good at was making ordinary speech carry more weight than it should. Willy Loman has no single quotable line the way a Tennessee Williams character does; the pressure sits in the rhythm, in a salesman repeating himself until the repetition becomes the tragedy. The Crucible runs the same trick in period costume, taking the Salem trials and letting the language of piety slide into the language of a purge. It has been read as an argument about its own decade ever since.

The rest of the shelf is less visited and worth knowing. Focus is a novel published in 1945, before any of the famous plays. An Enemy of the People is his version of Ibsen. The Misfits began as work for the screen. Late work like The last Yankee and Plain girl is small, quiet and much less visited.

He lived from 1915 to 2005, and the credit list carries a few oddities from that long span: a bit part as a line-up suspect in the 1947 noir Boomerang!, and, decades later, voice work on the documentary series The Civil War, reading William Tecumseh Sherman.