As a lackadaisical high school student, young “Art” showed little ambition and failed to gain acceptance to college, or at least one that wouldn’t charge him tuition. Initially born into wealth in 1915, Miller watched his father, an immigrant garment manufacturer, lose his fortune in the stock market crash of 1929, upending the family’s social and economic status overnight. How refreshing to meet this interesting, confused young writer before he became an institution, struggling to find a literary voice or even any vocation at all. To anyone who grew up with the image of Miller as a lionized elder statesman of the American theatre, Lahr’s account of Miller’s bumpy “origin story” is the most revelatory part of Arthur Miller: American Witness, the short biography he has written for Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series.
Yale University Press, November 2022, 264 pp, $26.00
