About the Author

John Lahr has been a contributor to the New Yorker since 1991, where for twenty-one years he was its senior drama critic. He is the author of eighteen books, including Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. He is the first critic to win a Tony Award, for coauthoring Elaine Stritch at Liberty.

Reviews

“Lahr’s cogent analyses [in Arthur Miller] are revelatory but not surgical, and his sympathy never cloys. He does what a good literary biographer must do: He does not reduce the work to the life, but shows how it explains the life from which it emerges. He is an investigative reporter, a profiler of personality, mind and character, and a critic who understands drama on the page and in the house.”—Willard Spiegelman, Wall Street Journal

“His plays, although rooted in the personal as John Lahr establishes, can still disclose truths about the political world that might otherwise be denied.”—John Stokes, Times Literary Supplement

Named by the New Yorker as a Best Book of 2022

“It is a tapestry rich with personal as well as public detail, but it also makes irrefutable the argument (sometimes opposed) that Miller’s Jewishness was foundational to his writing.”—John Nathan, Jewish Chronicle

“John Lahr’s excellent critical biography of Miller considers how inspiration might be experienced, by playwright and audience alike, as a kind of transcription.” —Ben Philips, The Tablet

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2023

“No one writes about playwrights and the theater the way John Lahr does. In this probing, brilliantly insightful, and also deeply readable and entertaining book, he offers unique insight into how Miller’s mind works, and how the details of his biography impacted his body of work.”—Sarah Ruhl, MacArthur Prize–winning playwright

“Lahr lets us see the great American playwright with new eyes. After his highly acclaimed Tennessee Williams biography, Lahr scores a second smash hit with Arthur Miller. No one writes more perceptively about the twentieth-century theater than John Lahr.”—John Guare, playwright, Six Degrees of Separation

“A superbly written, impeccably researched biography from the great John Lahr. The close relationship between Miller and his plays is detailed and sympathetic. A classic book about a classic American playwright.”—André Bishop, artistic director, Lincoln Center Theater

“In Arthur Miller, the great critic and biographer John Lahr has found a perfect subject: complex, gifted, a man of his times. This is biography-as-collaboration, and utterly captivating.”—Hilton Als, Pulitzer Prize–winning essayist and author