Christopher Bigsby and Arthur Miller shared a regular correspondence which stretched over nearly three decades of friendship. Their interaction and collaboration included a unique series of recorded interviews which now bring fresh and surprising perspectives to the life, thought and creative motivations of one of the greatest modern dramatists. The conversations range richly across topics such as the notorious McCarthy trials, the intent behind Miller's own work, and his family dynamics a...

The fourth in a series of books exploring the careers of 28 contemporary American playwrights, this book covers the work of four male writers, Lucas Hnath, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Stephen Karam and Tarell Alvin McCraney.The dramatic strategies of these award-winning playwrights range widely in styles and approach. Christopher Bigsby interweaves critical analysis of their work with biographical information, contemporary responses and the writers' own comments, drawn...

A Penguin ClassicJoe Keller and Steve Deever, partners in a machine shop during World War II, turned out defective airplane parts, causing the deaths of many men. Deever was sent to prison while Keller escaped punishment and went back to business, making himself very wealthy in the ensuing years. In Miller’s work of tremendous power, a love affair between Keller's son, Chris, and Ann Deever, Steve’s daughter, the bitterness of George Keller, who returns from the wa...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman’s deferred American dreamEver since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial. He has given us a figure ...

In American Dramatists in the 21st Century: Opening Doors, Christopher Bigsby examines the careers of seven award-winning playwrights: David Adjmi, Julia Cho, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Will Eno, Martyna Majok, Dominique Morisseau and Anna Ziegler. In addition to covering all their plays, including several as yet unpublished, he notes their critical reception while drawing on their own commentary on their approach to writing and the business of developing a career.The writers ...

The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture offers a comprehensive, authoritative and accessible overview of the cultural themes and intellectual issues that drive the dominant culture of the twentieth century. This companion explores the social, political and economic forces that have made America what it is today. It shows how these contexts impact upon twentieth-century American literature, cinema and art. An international team of contributors examines the special contribution of...

The early years of the twenty-first century saw several losses for the American theatre but also marked the emergence of a new generation of exciting playwrights. In this book, Christopher Bigsby explores the work of nine of these developing talents, and the importance of issues including race, gender and politics for their writing. Increasingly, these new figures are gaining their reputations not on Broadway but in small theatres and small towns or even abroad, bringing fresh and diverse ...

In a small Southern town, a white man tries to prevent a lynching and finds himself branded by the mob --- and worse, finds himself sheltering the dead man's son. When the killers come around to finish the job, the two victims are forced to flee across the country in the hopes of escaping men with nothing but vengeance on their minds.Just one step behind the vigilantes a solitary lawman tracks the men as he wrestles with the choice to either turn the customary blind eye or to put a ...

First published in 1985, C.W.E Bigsby examines the career and work of playwright David Mamet. Bigsby shows that Mamet is a fierce social critic, indicting an America corrupted at its core by myths of frontier individualism and competitive capitalism. Mamet has created plays whose bleak social vision and ironic metaphysics are redeemed, if at all, by the power of imagination. No American playwright before him has displayed the same sensitivity to language, detecting lyricism in the brutal i...

Something has happened in the world of television drama. For the last decade and a half America has assumed a dominant position. Novelists, screenwriters and journalists, who would once have had no interest in writing for television, indeed who often despised it, suddenly realised that it was where America could have a dialogue with itself. The new television drama was where writers could engage with the social and political realities of the time, interrogating the myths and values of a so...

A New Introduction to American Studies provides a coherent portrait of American history, literature, politics, culture and society, and also deals with some of the central themes and preoccupations of American life. It will provoke students into thinking about what it actually means to study a culture.Ideals such as the commitment to liberty, equality and material progress are fully examined and new light is shed on the sometimes contradictory ways in which these ideals ha...

First published in 1990, this book presents a discussion with Arthur Miller, in conversation with Christopher Bigsby. Miller talks openly and extensively about his own life and experiences, events and environments which provide material for his plays: his New York childhood, the Depression, the McCarthy witch-hunts. He discusses in depth both the technique of his writing and the moral and political questions which his plays address, and argues passionately for the importance of maintaining...