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This biography of Arthur Miller is quite thorough, but I am afraid, awfully slow going. Bigsby moves chronologically trough Miller's life until the death of his second wife, Marilyn Monroe, and then covers the remaining 50 years in the book's final two chapters. But if we are in, say 1949, we will get two or three later recollections of events of that year. Miller's older brother Kermit, for example, writes a letter about how happy he is in the aftermath of World War II, but later comments from Kermit's son suggest that his father was manic depressive from the end of the war until his death. While this approach offers valuable insight, Bigsby relies on the tactic far too much and plowing through this book becomes a chore.

The Collected Essays of Arthur Miller