Arthur Miller’s New York

Visions of the City

By: Stephen Marino

Take a tour of New York City as inspiration, place and context in the work of America's greatest playwright of the 20th century, brought to life with images from Miller's time and today.

Readers of the work of Arthur Miller will be familiar with the presence of NYC in much of his work. In Arthur Miller's New York Stephen Marino offers a rich, panoramic study of NYC across all of Miller's oeuvre, exploring how Miller transformed the defining experiences of his youth and early adulthood – formed on the streets and in the neighborhoods of the New York boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens – into art.

A crucial component of his creative DNA, NYC figures prominently in Miller's dramatic work: Death of a Salesman, A Memory of Two Mondays, A View From the Bridge, After the Fall, The Price, The American Clock, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, Broken Glass, and Mr. Peter’s Connections all have settings in which the characters’ interactions with the cityscape significantly determine the events of the plays.

Miller was also a prodigious fiction writer, and New York features in his two longer works of fiction: his only novel, Focus, is set in the borough of Queens and boldly confronts the issue of American anti-Semitism, and the novella, Homely Girl, A Life, creates a sweeping landscape of time and emotion in Manhattan. Many of Miller’s short stories depict New York settings that are catalysts for the main characters’ conflicts.

An evocative set of images from Miller's times and from the present period bring the character of New York City into sharp relief and trace its evolution over a century of change.

Critic reviews

[Stephen Marino] has come up with a different angle that sheds new light on the playwriting genius and the city that inspired him ... Very readable and informative.

A fascinating, engaging, and innovative crossover between scholarship and anecdote. Marino presents a convincing, accessible, and intelligent analysis of how Miller’s depictions of New York in his drama and fiction are akin to settings evoked in works by such literary icons as Faulkner and Joyce. He combines a deep understanding of Miller and his works with an encyclopedic understanding of New York and its boroughs throughout the twentieth century—offering a cultural-sociological study of the city as the playwright’s evident familiarity with its history, streets, and vagaries are authoritatively explicated. Illustrating these manifestations throughout a variety of Miller’s works—and forging insightful connections between them—Marino provides a solid case for approaching Miller through this geographical lens to uncover new possibilities in the texts themselves, while learning much about the city itself.

At long last, someone dared to address the multilayered relationship between Arthur Miller and New York City. That it is no other than Dr. Stephen Marino is an added cause for celebration given his unflagging devotion to Miller Studies for decades and first-rate scholarly contributions. Marino's book is a love letter to both New York and Miller, destined to become a seminal study for generations to come.