A new Penguin Plays edition of the forgotten classic that launched the career of one of America’s greatest playwrights It took more than fifty years for The Man Who Had All the Luck to be appreciated for what it truly is: the first stirrings of a genius that would go on to blossom in such masterpieces as Death of a Salesman and The Crucible. This striking new edition finally adds Miller’s first major play to the Penguin Plays series—now in beautifully redesigned covers. Infused with the moral malaise of the Depression era, this parable-like drama centers on David Beeves, a man before whom every obstacle to personal and professional success seems to crumble with ease. But his good fortune merely serves to reveal the tragedies of those around him in greater relief, offering what David believes to be evidence of a capricious god or, worse, a godless, arbitrary universe. David’s journey toward fulfillment becomes a nightmare of existential doubts, a desperate grasp for reason in a cosmos seemingly devoid of any, and a struggle that will take him to the brink of madness.

This Companion provides an introduction to one of the most important playwrights of the twentieth century.

Called the "theater equivalent of longtime New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael" by Matinee Magazine, critic and producer Steven Suskin chronicles the 2001-2002 theater season in his latest installment in the Broadway Yearbook series. Commenting with wit and erudition on each show that opened on Broadway between May 2001 and May 2002, Suskin's vivid descriptions recall Tony winners like Thoroughly Modern Millie and Urinetown and commercial smashes like Mamma Mia! and The Graduate. A great read for theater buffs, the book is also a valuable sourcebook for critics, Broadway historians, and theater professionals, providing an array of statistics on every Broadway production of the season, as well as noteworthy off-Broadway performances. The intelligent and witty Broadway Yearbook, 2001-2002 will engage theater lovers, performers, and critics alike.

First published in 1990, this book presents a discussion with Arthur Miller, in conversation with Christopher Bigsby. Miller talks openly and extensively about his own life and experiences, events and environments which provide material for his plays: his New York childhood, the Depression, the McCarthy witch-hunts. He discusses in depth both the technique of his writing and the moral and political questions which his plays address, and argues passionately for the importance of maintaining respect for human values in a world where they are so frequently transgressed. Interwoven with these conversations are contributions from actors, directors, designers, reviewers, and writers who have encountered Miller over the years – whether in person or through his plays – which attest to the universal and enduring importance of his work.

Ash Hawkins, Duke of Buckley, no more wants to marry than he wants a stick in his eye. As the owner of a gaming hell, he is all too aware the odds of a happy marriage are against him. But raising his three rebellious wards alone is proving more than he can handle. He needs to find someone who stands to benefit from a marriage of convenience as much as he does. Someone logical, clinical, and rational. And in a stroke of luck, he quite literally stumbles over just such a woman. After years of ridicule for being more interested in bugs than boys, Bronwyn has accepted that she’ll never marry for love. Her parents, however, are threatening to find her a husband. Bronwyn doesn’t need any scientific research to show her Ash has secrets. But his proposal would give her the freedom to continue her entomology research and perhaps finally get published. Just as long as she can keep her mind on her work and off his piercing eyes, broad shoulders, and wicked, wicked tongue.

During his lifetime, US playwright Arthur Miller was affronted in numerous ways by what he experienced, either personally, or vicariously through the experiences of others. For example: By the way his immigrant family had come to financial grief in the Great Depression (1929 to the late 1930s), through no fault of their own. By the anti-Semitism that existed in the USA and elsewhere in the 1930s, culminating in the Nazi Holocaust in which so many people of his own ethnic group, the Jews, together with millions of other innocents, perished. By the way he and others, including many connected with the arts, were persecuted for alleged communist sympathies in the McCarthy ‘witch-hunts’ of the late 1940s and 1950s in the USA. By the way that atheism, to which he himself subscribed, was considered to be subversive and unpatriotic. By the way that the ‘American Dream’ was generally portrayed as something to which everybody could aspire: and yet, by embracing the concept of the American Dream, most people were generally setting themselves up to fail. Despite his disillusionment with life, Miller strove to illuminate a path to a better way and in doing so, offered hope to the inhabitants of the flawed and troubled world in which he found himself, not just in the USA but also elsewhere.

The definitive memoir of Arthur Miller—the famous playwright of The Crucible, All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, A View from the Bridge, and other plays—Timebends reveals Miller’s incredible trajectory as a man and a writer. Born in 1915, Miller grew up in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, developed leftist political convictions during the Great Depression, achieved moral victory against McCarthyism in the 1950s, and became president of PEN International near the end of his life, fighting for writers’ freedom of expression. Along the way, his prolific output established him as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century—he wrote twenty-two plays, various screenplays, short stories, and essays, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1949 for Death of a Salesmanand the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1947 for All My Sons. Miller also wrote the screenplay for The Misfits, Marilyn Monroe’s final film. This memoir also reveals the incredible host of notables that populated his life, including Marilyn Monroe, Elia Kazan, Clark Gable, Sir Laurence Olivier, John F. Kennedy, and Mikhail Gorbachev. Leaving behind a formidable reputation in the worlds of theater, cinema, and politics, Arthur Miller died in 2005 but his memoir continues his legacy.

Arthur Miller is regarded as one of the most important playwrights of the twentieth century, and his work continues to be widely performed and studied around the world. This updated Companion includes Miller's work since the publication of the first edition in 1997 - the plays Mr Peters' Connections, Resurrection Blues, and Finishing the Picture - and key productions of his plays since his death in 2005. The chapter on Miller and the cinema has been completely revised to include new films, and demonstrates that Miller's work remains an important source for filmmakers. In addition to detailed analyses of plays including Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, Miller's work is also placed within the context of the social and political climate of the time. The volume closes with a bibliographic essay which reviews the key studies of Miller and also contains a detailed chronology of the work of this influential dramatist.

(Applause Books). Conversations with Miller offers a personal and revealing account of one of the major playwrights of our time. Arthur Miller is revealed in deep and candid conversation with the highly regarded dramatic critic, Mel Gussow. In this series of interviews, which took place over 40 years, Miller is astonishingly forthcoming about his creative sources, his accomplishments and his disappointment; about his staunch resistance to the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950's; about his private life including his five-year marriage to Marilyn Monroe. The result is an intimate portrait of a cultural giant who is both refreshingly down to earth and a fiercely original writer and thinker.