FRANKLIN LIBRARY SIGNED 1st Ed. TIMEBENDS Arthur Miller

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FRANKLIN LIBRARY TIMEBENDS A Life ARTHUR MILLER With a specially commissioned frontispiece by Christine Bunn and Illustrated with a portfolio of photographs Beautiful Topgrain Leather Limited Signed First Edition One of the "Signed First Edition Society" Collection, privately printed by the Franklin Library, and personally signed by the late Arthur Miller Arthur Miller, a lanky, wiry man whose dark hair turned to gray in his later years, always retained the appearance of a 1930's intellectual, whether he was wearing work boots and blue jeans while fixing his porch or seated at his computer - 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, his autobiography, 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 plays as a way to change America and, as he put it, "that meant grabbing people and shaking them by the back of the neck." Miller had known hard work firsthand in an automobile-parts warehouse during the Depression; in what he called a mouse house, where he earned $15 a month feeding mice used in medical experiments; and on the night shift in the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II. But he called playwriting the hardest work of all. "You know," he said, "a playwright lives in an occupied country. He's the enemy. And if you can't live like that, you don't stay. It's tough. He's got to be able to take a whack, and he's got to swallow bicycles and digest them." Arthur Miller was born on West 110th Street in Manhattan on Oct. 17, 1915, to Augusta and Isidore Miller. His father was a coat manufacturer and so prosperous that he rode in a chauffeur-driven car from the family apartment overlooking the northern edge of Central Park to the Seventh Avenue garment district. For a child, as Mr. Miller remembered in Timebends, life unfolded as "a kind of scroll whose message was surprise and mostly good news." The Depression changed everything for the family, and it became a theme that etched its way through Arthur Miller plays, from "Death of a Salesman" and "The Price" to "After the Fall," "The American Clock" and "A Memory of Two Mondays." The crash meant the collapse of the coat business and a move from the apartment overlooking the park to considerably reduced circumstances in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where the teenaged Arthur worked as a bakery delivery boy and developed a knack for carpentry, which left him fascinated, he said, with "the idea of creating a new shadow on the earth." He attended James Madison High School, graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1932, and then went to work in the auto-parts warehouse, earning $15 a week and saving $13 a week for college. Mr. Miller said he was not much of a student, but he knew by the time he was 16 that he wanted to be a writer. He recalled a terrific urge to tell stories, a talent that he said made him a center of attention. In his introduction written especially for this Franklin Library signed first edition of Timebends , Miller writes: I had played around with short autobiographical fragments for many years before committing myself to such a work. I think that what may finally have brought me to it was the pleasurable discovery of a form which in effect bends time, rather than treating it as a straight line marked off by dates and a progression of events. It is a form somewhat reminiscent of the one I found for Death of a Salesman , which likewise allows Willy Loman to move in imagination whenever the pressures of his conflicts takes him, and at the moment they arise in his mind. The form of Timebends follows more or less the structure of our common way of thinking and recollecting, the better to illuminate both the inner evolution of one man in these last ... read more

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