Arthur Miller, 1915-2005

I had the great pleasure of serving on a magazine staff while in college (the Michigan Gargoyle) that had Arthur Miller as an alumnus. I remember a disparaging phone call from the Harvard Lampoon one time, when one of their gang of idiots condescendingly asked us what our alumni had gone on to write, and we casually said, "Oh nothing, just Death of a Salesman, All My Sons, The Crucible."

He was always my favorite playwright, able to bring political and social themes to his stories without them becoming polemics, without sacrificing character development to the allegory. He will be missed, particularly with today's American theatre scene consisting almost entirely of musicals and revivals.