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ARTHUR MILLER: A CRITICAL STUDY. By Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; pp. x + 514. $85.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.
In Arthur Miller: A Critical Study, Christopher Bigsby attempts a comprehensive exploration of the literary output of a writer whose career spanned eight decades. It is a daunting task and the culmination of Bigsby's study of Miller that began in the late 1960s. It is also a task that Bigsby accomplishes with skill, perceptivity, and insight born of a lengthy personal relationship with a writer whom he believes had "fallen out of favor in his native America for the previous thirty years" (1). If there is a core to this work, other than its exhaustive treatment of nearly everything Miller wrote, published or unpublished, it is Bigsby's attempt to elevate the writer's standing in this country to the same level as in Europe, where Miller "seems in every way a modern voice" (2).
Bigsby largely arranges his study of Miller's career chronologically, beginning with his time as an undergraduate playwright at the University of Michigan in 1935, through his last play, Finishing the Picture, which he continued to revise in 2003 and 2004. Although the nucleus of the text is Bigsby's critical analysis of Miller's words, the subtext is Arthur Miller himself. In more detail than one might expect from a work of literary analysis, Bigsby attempts to explain a man who...