“Who else is there, in this final decade of the millennium, who could say as much?,” Christopher Bigsby writes, admiring Arthur Miller's staggeringly large creative output in the decade of the nineties (“Miller” 182). In his view, Miller's plays offer “an alternative history” to the twentieth century (Portable xxv) as the playwright sustained an unfailing output of plays in each approaching decade, an abundantly fertile exercise that began in the 1930s. Correspondingly, for all of his painstaking work that has gone into analyzing and understanding a writing career of over seventy years, and for being as prolific as his subject, Bigsby, the British author, critic, and one of the most important scholars of American drama, merits celebration.

Many scholars focus on Miller's great works of 1940s and 1950s as compared to the late plays of the 1990s and early 2000s. Nonetheless, Bigsby regards the nineties as Miller's “most prolific”...

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