The life of the playwright behind ‘Death of a Salesman’
John Lahr’s biography of Arthur Miller opens with a riveting chapter on the creation and the electric 1949 debut of the playwright’s masterwork, “Death of a Salesman.” Lahr calls the play’s impact on American theater “seismic.” But at the first performance, when the curtain came down, the audience sat in stunned silence, “like a funeral,” Miller recalled. “I didn’t know whether the show was dead or alive.… Finally, someone thought to
