Echoes Down the Corridor Author:Arthur Miller For some fifty years now, Arthur Miller has been not only America's premier playwright, but also one of our foremost public intellectuals and cultural critics. Echoes Down the Corridor gathers together a dazzling array of more than forty previously uncollected essays and works of reportage, from "Belief in America" (1944), which recounts Miller... more »'s experiences during the Second World War , to the "The Crucible in History", his 1999 Massey lecture at Harvard, published here for the first time. Spanning the second half of the twentieth century, Echoes Down the Corridor takes us on a whirlwind tour of modern history, as Miller captures the frenzied spirit of our schizophrenic age: the Holocaust and the Nazi war crime trials; the depredations of McCarthyism and "The Night Ed Murrow Struck Back"; Vietnam and a firsthand report on the 1968 "Battle of Chicago"; Watergate and the failed Nixon presidency. Here is Arthur Miller, the brilliant social and political commentator - but here, too, Miller the literary critic (on Mark Twain, Ibsen and Tennessee Williams); the Swiftian satirist ("Let's Privatize Congress") ; the world traveler (with his wife Inge Morath at the Opera House in Tashkent, with Harold Pinter in Turkey, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and "Lucky" Luciano in Sicily). Giving a rare glimpse of the private man behind the internationally renowned public figure, Miller's personal essays paint a fascinating portrait of the artist through poignant reminiscence and evocative memoirs - of a Brooklyn boyhood during the Depression, of his formative years as a young playwright, of an incredible lifetime in and out of the theatre. Witty and wise, rich in artistry and insight, Echoes Down the Corridor reaffirms Arthur Miller's standing as one of the greatest writers of our time.« less