One should not be surprised when an 89-year-old man dies, but Miller's
death caught me short and leaves me with deep grief. Not a relative, just
"another writer," one whose imperfections are probably all too
glaring. But one who had something that seems to have vanished from the
landscape: a moral and social conscience and the courage to exercise them
on paper. If Death of a Salesman was not the grandiosely-described tragedy
of everyman, it came closer than anything else I know to expressing "an
American tragedy" born of a twisted ethos of life in the States that
prevails to this day. And as for The Crucible...I wish it were still not
as relevant as it was in 1953, but that says more about us than about
Miller himself.
He was a deeply gifted man and I shall miss him deeply.
Ken
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Kenneth Wolman www.kenwolman.com kenwolman.blogspot.com
"This is the best of all possible worlds only because it is the only one
that showed up."-- Russell Edson
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