Arthur Miller, legendary playwright, dies at 89

Arthur Miller, one of the great American playwrights, whose work exposed the flaws in the fabric of the American dream, died Thursday night ...

Arthur Miller, one of the great American playwrights, whose work exposed the flaws in the fabric of the American dream, died Thursday night at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. He was 89. The cause was congestive heart failure, said his assistant.

The author of Death of a Salesman, a landmark of 20th-century drama, Miller grappled with the weightiest matters of social conscience in his plays. They often reflected or reinterpreted the stormy and very public elements of his own life, including his brief and rocky marriage to Marilyn Monroe and his staunch refusal to cooperate with the red-baiting House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Death of a Salesman, which opened on Broadway in 1949, established Miller as a giant of the theater when he was only 33. It won the triple crown of theatrical artistry that year: the Pulitzer, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Tony Award.

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But the play’s enormous success also overshadowed Miller’s long career. Although The Crucible, a 1953 play about the Salem witch trials inspired by his virulent hatred of McCarthyism, and A View From the Bridge, a 1955 drama of obsession and betrayal, would ultimately take their place as popular classics of the international stage, Miller’s later plays never equaled his early successes. Although he wrote a total of 17 plays, The Price, produced during the 1967-68 season, was his last solid critical and commercial hit.

Nevertheless, Miller wrote successfully in a wide variety of other media. Perhaps most notably, he wrote the screenplay for The Misfits, a 1961 movie directed by John Huston and starring Monroe, to whom he was married at the time. He also wrote essays, short stories and a 1987 autobiography, Timebends: A Life.

But his reputation rests on a handful of his best-known plays, the dramas of guilt and betrayal and redemption that continue to be revived frequently at theaters all over the world. These dramas of social conscience were drawn from life and informed by the Great Depression, the event that he believed had had a more profound impact on the nation than any other in American history, except possibly the Civil War.

‘‘In play after play,’’ the drama critic Mel Gussow wrote in The New York Times, ‘‘he holds man responsible for his and for his neighbor’s actions.’’

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Miller, a lanky, wiry man whose dark hair turned to gray in his later years, retained the appearance of a 1930’s intellectual whether wearing work boots and blue jeans while fixing his back porch or seated behind his word processor or typewriter when the power failed at his 350-acre farm in Litchfield County.

Writing plays was for him, he once said, like breathing. He wrote in Timebends that when he was young, he ‘‘imagined that with the possible exception of a doctor saving a life, writing a worthy play was the most important thing a human being could do.’’

He also saw playwriting as a way to change America, and, as he put it, ‘‘that meant grabbing people and shaking them by the back of the neck.’’ —NYT

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Kurnool bus accident that killed 20 caused by drunk biker, says forensic report

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A forensic report has concluded that the Kurnool bus accident, which claimed 20 lives, was caused by a drunk biker, B Shiva Shankar. The biker was allegedly driving under the influence when his bike skidded on a wet road and collided with the bus, causing it to burst into flames. The police have gathered evidence and the investigation is ongoing.

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