Attention Must Be Paid

"Still, it cannot be a coincidence that it was in the late 1940s and early 1950s, exactly when Miller’s Popular Front views were under the strongest pressure, that he produced his best work. Earlier, when Miller could luxuriate in the group- and Group-think of the left, his writing was too blunt and simplistic. Afterward, when he had been through the Monroe whirlwind, and when the radicalism of the 1930s was superseded by the radicalism of the 1960s, he was bewildered, and could only look inward and backward for subject matter. But from 1946 to 1955, he was energized by the difficulty of using the theater to save a country that evidently did not want saving, at least not his way."

Adam Kirsch in The New Republic reviews Christopher Bigsby's Arthur Miller.