He's from Brooklyn and his life is rife with references back to his boyhood there in and around neighborhoods where I grew up. ...Then there was Marilyn, and then his embattlement with McCarthy -- all of great interest to me, topped off by his notion of the world's workings, the randomness of it all, men and women struggling to make something of value in their lives and facing the futility of much that's gone before and lies ahead.20 ( )

To tell you the truth this book can be a bit of a slog at times if you aren't a Miller nut & I certainly am not....but it's still a very interesting read and worth the effort and contains some very affecting pieces. ( )

From Publishers Weekly: America's most famous living playwright (All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, Incident at Vichy, etc.) here does with his life story what nature does with rock strata, folding it back on itself to achieve the effects of many-layered richness and simultaneity that he aims for in his plays. It's a life as remarkable for its commitment as its achievement. Growing up on the edge of Harlem in the '20s and '30s, the son of a successful but semiliterate coat manufacturer, Miller discovered both his vocation and his leftist political convictions during the Depression and the rise of fascism. He achieved a moral victory against McCarthyism in the '50s; and it was under his presidency that PEN went from an ineffectual literary club to a real force for international freedom of expression. While covering these events, Miller traces the genesis of his plays in his life experience, provides vivid portraits of a host of notables in the worlds of theater, cinema and politics, including Elia Kazan, Lee and Paula Strasberg, John Huston, Clark Gable, Sir Laurence Olivier, John F. Kennedy and Mikhail Gorbachev, and a detailed, deeply touching one of his second wife, Marilyn Monroe, who finally slipped from his reach. Tough, compassionate, bristling with intelligence and profound reflections on the dramas of life and stage, this is one of the memorable autobiographies of our time. Photos. BOMC selection. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.