In his autobiography, Timebends, Arthur Miller recalled his feelings as he wrote his first play, No Villain, the drama that won an Avery Hopwood Award at the University of Michigan and launched his career:

From the beginning, the idea of writing a play was entwined with my very conception of myself. Playwriting was an act of self-discovery from the start and would always be; it was kind of a license to say the unspeakable, and I would never write anything good that did not somehow make me blush. From the beginning, writing meant freedom, a spreading of wings, and once I got the first inkling that others were reached by what I wrote, an assumption arose that some kind of public business was happening inside me, that what perplexed or moved me must move others. (Miller 1987, 212)

Miller’s intuitive awareness of the capability of his art to move an audience remained an inviolable impetus for every play he wrote over the next seventy years. Moreover, his nascent inkling that others were reached by what he wrote was prophetic, for Miller’s work—written mostly in the twentieth century—continues to be relevant to twenty-first-century audiences.

Indeed, Arthur Miller was a man of the twentieth century: His life and career immersed in the cataclysmic events that defined what often is called “America’s Century.” Miller’s ninety years spanned almost the entire time period. Born in 1915 while World War I raged, he died in 2005 in the Age of Terrorism. His world view and moral principles were formed in the crucible of the political, economic, and social events of the era: the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War II, the Red Scare and Communist Witch Hunts, the cultural revolution of the 1960s and Vietnam, the Cold War, Reaganism, the Arab-Israel conflicts, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the New World Order. In his professional and personal life, Arthur Miller boldly confronted the conflicts of his time. In his plays, fictions, and essays, he frequently took stands, popular and unpopular, on moral, social, and political problems—whether we liked hearing them or not. The great themes of his work and career—family and society, individual and social conscience, private and public responsibility, and guilt and betrayal—are what engaged societies throughout the world in his time and continue to do so in our own.

At the start of his career, Arthur Miller was grouped with his contemporary and near-contemporary American playwrights. Tennessee Williams and Miller dominated the 1940s and 1950s on Broadway with such plays as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and A View from the Bridge—although both were often in the shadow of Eugene O’Neill’s earlier successes and the posthumous production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night in 1956, when O’Neill’s reputation resurged. Edward Albee was included in the 1960s with the successful Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and A Delicate Balance, enshrining the four as the major mid-twentieth-century American playwrights. When Miller died in 2005, just short of his ninetieth birthday, the worldwide headlines in the media proclaimed his status.

The period since Arthur Miller’s death has provided ample time for critics to consider his ultimate place as one of the major dramatists of world theater. As his biographer Christopher Bigsby noted, “When he died, all manner of people suddenly realized, what they should have known all along, that losing Arthur Miller was like losing Chekhov, or Ibsen, or Strindberg” (Bigsby 2005, 17). His world vision, large social themes, and his connection to the universal human condition make him so attractive to worldwide audiences. His plays flourish in American and international productions because his great themes cross all borders.

The 2015 centennial of Arthur Miller’s birth was celebrated around the globe with acclaimed revivals of his plays, media documentaries, academic conferences, and new criticism. Much of Miller scholarship is fed by performance, and the last years have seen striking productions of Miller’s major and lesser-known plays, including the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon staging Death of a Salesman and the London production of avant-garde director Ivo van Hove’s remaking of A View from the Bridge. English audiences also saw world premieres of dramas that never had been produced: a staged version of The Hook (the screenplay that Miller wrote about the Sicilian American dockworkers in Brooklyn, which he and Elia Kazan peddled in Hollywood in 1951), and his first play, No Villain. In New York, a Yiddish production of Death of a Salesman played off Broadway, as did Incident at Vichy, featuring Richard Thomas as Von Berg. Von Hove directed an acclaimed revival of The Crucible, and a Broadway revival of The Price starred Mark Ruffalo, Tony Shaloub, Jessica Hecht, and Danny DeVito.

Interest in Miller’s work remains unabated. Most contemporary drama scholars are familiar with the adulation of Miller in Britain where, as the director David Thacker famously said regarding Miller’s reputation: “We consider him only a little lower than Shakespeare, but a little higher than God” (Brater, 7). In 2019, London—always a hotbed of Miller activity—witnessed an unprecedented five productions of his plays in stunning new performances: A mixed race staging of Death of A Salesman at the Young Vic, an all-female casting of The Crucible by The Yard, a race-blind production of The American Clock at the Old Vic, a revival of The Price featuring David Suchet as Solomon, and a major revival of All My Sons with the American actors Sally Field and Bill Pullman and the English stars Jenna Coleman and Colin Morgan. In Miller’s native New York, a major revival of All My Sons, featuring Tracy Letts and Annette Benning, caused considerable controversy when director Gregory Mosher withdrew from the production over a casting dispute. Off Broadway theatres also mounted The Archbishop’s Ceiling and two productions of The Crucible. Also, Brave New World produced a staged theatrical reading of The Hook, Miller’s unproduced 1949 screenplay. The American premiere of the work, which also spawned A View from the Bridge, took place at the Waterfront Barge Museum, docked in Red Hook, the Brooklyn neighborhood where Miller researched the waterfront. Thus, Miller’s drama continues—and will continue—to be relevant in the twenty-first century and consequently generate much theater and literary criticism.

Miller wrote many of his plays as social and political commentary on twentieth-century events. Since his death, it is tempting to ask, “What would Miller say?” about current national issues or international crises: for example, How would he have viewed the 2016 presidential election? What does his work say about our current political climate? Miller’s powerful voice, stopped by death, still speaks to us about these. In 2001, Miller gave the annual Jefferson Lecture in Washington, DC, and caused a stir with his controversial opinion on the disputed 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush. His speech, “Politics and the Art of Acting ,” skewered both political parties and their candidates for their insincere performances and were strikingly prophetic about the 2016 election:

….Whether he admits it or not, the actor wants to be not only believed and admired, but also loved; what may help to account for the dullness of the last campaign was the absence of affection for either [candidate]….By the end it seemed like an unpopularity contest, a competition for who was less disliked by more people than the other, a demonstration of negative consent. (Miller 2001, 44)

Today his plays, stories, essays, and speeches are filtered through the lens of twenty-first-century events, and there has been a surge of revivals instigated by contemporary events. The U.S. political climate keeps Miller’s work much in the news. Remarking on the frequent productions of The Crucible, Miller realized that the play is produced in a country whenever a political coup appears imminent or a dictatorial regime has just been overthrown (Miller 1996, 162). Certainly, America’s political divisions, which continue unabated after the bruising presidential election, make it seem that Ivo Van Hove’s 2016 Broadway production was prescient. In 2018, when the accusations broke against Judge Brett Kavanaugh after his nomination to the Supreme Court, the hearings and investigations were compared to witch hunts, and many references were made to The Crucible. In an op-ed piece in The Washington Times, conservative columnist Suzanne Fields offered striking parallels to the play, maintaining that Brett Kavanaugh could play John Proctor. Moreover, one of President Trump’s favorite descriptions of the press and media is to call them the “Enemy of the People.” In 1950, Miller wrote his version of the Ibsen play of that title because of the Communist Witch Hunts. The President’s repeated use of the phrase spurred revivals of Miller’s drama on many world stages. Who would have thought that Donald Trump could promote Arthur Miller?

At his core, Arthur Miller was always an autobiographical writer whose many works illustrate the conflict between the private and public. Miller scholarship is on the cusp of reinvention as new resources about his personal and professional life become available to scholars. In 2018, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin announced its acquisition from the Miller Estate of the remainder of his papers, which includes not only drafts and original scripts of his plays, but also a cache of diaries, letters, notebooks, and personal correspondence. The center completed its cataloging in 2019 and the material is now available. Also, his daughter, Rebecca Miller, directed a critically acclaimed 2018 HBO documentary, Arthur Miller, Writer, that gave the opportunity to see an intimate portrait of her father in his own voice and love letters written to his wives: Mary Slattery, Marilyn Monroe, and Inge Morath. In addition, in 2019 the Arthur Miller Trust announced that Rebecca Miller is donating her father’s writing studio, which was located on his Tophet Road property in Roxbury, Connecticut, to the newly forming non-profit Arthur Miller Writing Studio organization, which will locate the studio next to the town library in Roxbury. Miller had this studio built when he moved from his original home in Roxbury at 153 Tophet Road to 232 Tophet Road in the spring of 1958. The studio was designed as a small space and then expanded slightly in the 1960s. There he wrote and revised plays such as After the Fall and The Price, screenplays including The Misfits, his autobiography Timebends, and his later plays. As the center of Miller’s creative life for almost half a century, this writing studio holds a signature place in American literary history. The studio will contain the original furnishings and the studio library of Miller and his third wife, the photographer Inge Morath.¹ Thus, scrutiny of his letters, diaries, and correspondence ...