Recent Publications

Books and Essays on or pertaining to Miller (not including anything printed in the Arthur Miller Journal)

2018–current 

(Go here for older items that are now in the Archive 2005-2017)

  • As part of Brill’s Theatre Studies series, Ciarán Leinster has an exciting new book coming out on 27 March 2025––currently titled: Postmodernism in Arthur Miller’s Long-Late Period (Brill, 2025) ISBN: 978-90-04-69298-5 Hardcopy $114. “Having made his reputation in the 1940s and ‘50s, Arthur Miller continued to write into the twenty-first century, producing his final play in 2004, the year before his death. Though little critical, academic, or theatrical attention was paid to his plays after 1968’s The Price, he had one of the longest “late” periods in literary history. This book brings new attention to Miller’s writing from this period, analysing five plays and a host of essays to highlight the influence of postmodernism on his work. Using relevant novels and films, these plays are situated within their cultural moments to show that Miller always remained an engaged, aware, and contemporary writer.”
  • Patricia Zipprodt with Arnold Wengrow. If the Song Doesn’t Work, Change the Dress: The Illustrated Memoirs of Broadway Costume Designer Patricia Zipprodt. London: Methuen Drama, 2025, pp 55-58. The pages cover her costume designs for the famous Word Baker production of The Crucible in 1958, along with some interesting recollections.The Guardian included a picture of her costume for Proctor from a gallery they published announcing the new book.
  • New book on Miller by a British Doctor turned scholar, Andrew Norman: The Real Arthur Miller: The Playwright Who Cared, White Owl, 2024 [ISBN: 9781399040730]. A biographical approach that covers Miller’s experiences, background, and outlook to assess the development of his beliefs and goals as a Jewish American playwright.
  • Professor Bonnie Costello tells us about an interesting 1962 production of The Crucible at Boston University, starring Faye Dunaway as Elizabeth Proctor.
  • Stephen Rebello’s recent book, A City Full of Hawks: On the Waterfront Seventy Years Later―Still the Great American Contender. (New York: Applause 2024). According to one review: “Rebello describes how progressive playwright and screenwriter Arthur Miller was involved in the waterfront project from the start. He offers an intriguing story of the contrasting politics between Miller and Kazan and how studio heads responded to both.” It’s not the first time the connection has been noted or detailed but this may offer something new.
  • A recently discovered letter by Miller written in Oct. 1949 to a university student who had reached out to him as part of a journalism assignment was printed for the first time in the Atlantic April 2024 issue under the title “Arthur Miller Explains Death of a Salesman” by Andrew Aoyama, for those of you with access. It offers a useful companion to his article of that same year called “Tragedy and the Common Man.”
  • A new piece on Miller, Kazan, and the whole HUAC/Crucible deal from Stacy Schiff called “Hallucinatory Spitballs”—if you have access to the New York Review (2 Nov. 2023 issue).
  • Ramón Espejo, The Catalonian Journey of American Drama 1909-2000, by Modern Humanities Research Association, 2024. This book obviously looks at more than just Miller but the cover speaks volumes! More details can be found here.
  • Euta Sapanako Awasan is a Nepali translation of Death of a Salesman written by Arthur Miller. The translation of the play is done by poet Viplob Pratik with Willy renamed as: Biren Pratap Karki.
  • The Methuen Drama Student Editions of Miller’s plays, approved by the Arthur Miller Estate, have been revised with new editors for each volume to have a stronger focus on current DEI isssues and the performative aspects of the plays. Also two plays were added to the collection. All are being published in the UK and other countries in 2022 (not US where Penguin holds the license for Miller’s plays). The Crucible (June), Death of a Salesman (June), Incident at Vichy (June), A View from the Bridge (June), All My Sons (November), The Price (November), A Memory of Two Mondays (November), Broken Glass (November), After the Fall (November), The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (November), The Last Yankee (November) and The American Clock (November). Check the Methuen Drama website at Bloomsbury for more details.
  • 1 Nov. sees the release of John Lahr’s Arthur Miller: American Witness. Yale UP, 2022.Bringing a unique perspective to the life of Arthur Miller (1915–2005), the playwright who almost single-handedly propelled twentieth-century American theater into a new level of cultural sophistication. Organized around the fault lines of Miller’s life—his family, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, Elia Kazan and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Marilyn Monroe, Vietnam, and the rise and fall of Miller’s role as a public intellectual—this book demonstrates the synergy between Arthur Miller’s psychology and his plays. Concentrating largely on Miller’s most prolific decades of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Lahr probes Miller’s early playwriting failures; his work writing radio plays during World War II after being rejected for military service; his only novel, Focus; and his succession of award-winning and canonical plays that include All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible, providing an original interpretation of Miller’s work and his personality.
  • Josh Lambert’s The Literary Mafia; Jews, Publishing, and Postwar American Literature, published this past July 2022 by Yale UP, includes a comment written by Miller back in 1950 which is as one reviewer suggests, “arguably the saddest comment stemming from this period of literary disenfranchisement”). Here is what Miller wrote: “I gave up the Jews as literary material because I was afraid that even an innocent allusion to the individual wrong-doing of an individual Jew would be inflamed by the atmosphere, ignited by the hatred I suddenly was aware of, and my love would be twisted into a weapon of persecution against Jews.”
  • Claire Gleitman Anxious Masculinity in the Drama of Arthur Miller and Beyond: Salesmen, Sluggers, and Big Daddies. Methuen Drama, 2022. First two chapters focus on Miller and then get connected to themes that run through Tennessee Williams and on to a variety of contemporary playwrights, and even the contemporary political scene. A thoughtful and thought-provoking study.
  • Ambika Singh, “‘No Country for Old Men’: A Poignant Portrayal of Aging and Ageism in Arthur Miller’s Mr. Peters’ Connections” in Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, volume 26, number 1, 2020. A welcome study of this much overlooked play.
  • Stephen Marino, and David Palmer, eds. Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Views of his Writings and Ideals. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Contains an introduction and seventeen new essays on Miller’s work, covering not only plays but also essays and fiction.
  • A new edition of Miller’s All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and A View from the Bridge, translated into Armenian by Jas Seymour, 2019.
  • Minou Arjomand’s Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment, Columbia UP, 2018, contains a section on Miller.
  • Visions of Tragedy in Modern American Drama, edited by David Palmer, Methuen, 2018, with a chapter on Miller by Stephen Marino, and chapters covering a panoply of US playwrights.
  • Robert C. Evans has an essay “Linda Loman and Cognitive Psychology in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman” in his book Critical Approaches to Literature. Feminist, Salem Press, 2018
  • A Literary Journey to Jewish Identity: Re-Reading Bellow, Roth, Malamud, Ozick and Other Great Jewish Writers by Stephen B. Shepard. Bayberry Books, 2018. Contains some discussion of Miller.
  • Critical Insights: The Crucible, edited by Robert C. Evans, Salem Press, 2018; a collection of new essays on Miller’s seminal play. Contains a wealth of approaches and differing opinions.
  • Contemporary Literature Criticism on Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, edited by Lawrence Trudeau, Gale/Cengage, 2018. A collection of reprints from other sources.