Arthur Miller

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“Mattress-Laden Fire Escapes Lined The Block Like Iron Bunk Beds”

August 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The only air conditioning related trivia I know: It was the late actor Tony Randall’s favorite technology. No, not exactly required knowledge.

While AC may not have been quite as revolutionary as the washing machine, it certainly changed life in industrialized societies dramatically. From Henry Grabar’s Salon article, “How Air Conditioning Remade Modern America“:

“The environment has changed too: Summer in the city isn’t as hot as it used to be, thanks to air conditioning. When Jane Jacobs described the ‘sidewalk ballet,’ fewer than 14 percent of households in urban America had air conditioning. Today, it’s over 87 percent.

It’s almost impossible to imagine, dashing from the house A/C to the car A/C to the office A/C to the restaurant A/C, how hot and different the American summer once was.

One evocative recollection of the un-air-conditioned American city is Arthur Miller’s vignette ‘Before Air-Conditioning,’ which describes New York in the summer of 1927. The street in those days was repurposed nightly as an outdoor dormitory; mattress-laden fire escapes lined the block like iron bunk beds.

Lacking that option, there was always Central Park, where Miller would ‘walk among the hundreds of people, singles and families, who slept on the grass, next to their big alarm clocks, which set up a mild cacophony of the seconds passing, one clock’s ticks syncopating with another’s. Babies cried in the darkness, men’s deep voices murmured, and a woman let out an occasional high laugh beside the lake.’

That was the year Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs; then came air conditioning and the reinvention of American life.

The National Academy of Engineering ranked air conditioning the tenth-most important achievement of the 20th century.”

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The Birth Of The Death Of A Salesman

April 20, 2010 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

Miller grew up well-to-do in NYC, the son of a wealthy Polish-Jewish immigrants.

From Elia Kazan’s famed 1949 production of Death of a Salesman until the end of his life in 2005, Arthur Miller was a towering figure in American letters. In a 1966 interview in the Paris Review, he looked back on the humble origins of his career as a playwright. An excerpt:

Interviewer: Would you tell us a little about the beginning of your writing career?

Arthur Miller: The first play I wrote was in Michigan in 1935. It was written on a spring vacation in six days. I was so young that I dared to do such things, begin it and finish it in a week. I’d seen about two plays in my life, so I didn’t know how long an act was supposed to be, but across the hall there was a fellow who did the costumes for the University theater, and he said, “Well, it’s roughly forty minutes.” I had written an enormous amount of material and I got an alarm clock. It was all a lark to me, and not to be taken too seriously…that’s what I told myself. As it turned out the acts were longer than that, but the sense of the timing was in me even from the beginning, and the play had a form right from the start.

Being a playwright was always the maximum idea. I’d always felt that the theater was the most exciting and the most demanding form one could master. When I began to write, one assumed inevitably that one was in the mainstream that began with Aeschylus and went through about 2500 years of playwriting. There are so few masterpieces in the theater, as opposed to the other arts, that one can pretty much encompass them all by the age of nineteen.”

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