In his lifetime the great American playwright Arthur Miller published two highly regarded collections of stories, I Don’t Need You Any More (1967) and Homely Girl, a Life (1995). Shortly after his death in 2005 a final collection, Presence (2007), appeared. Now, all eighteen of these stories are gathered together in one volume for the first time, including the six from Presence, previously only published in the USA.
In his plays Miller took on the big themes of the day, putting stories of the Depression, wartime deceit and the McCarthy era on stage with an energy and passion not seen before and rarely since. In these stories he turns his attention to smaller, more intimate themes, yet still brings to bear the profound insight, humanism, empathy and wit of his work for the theatre. Including the early, O. Henry Award-winning ‘I Don’t Need You Anymore’, the original story of ‘The Misfits’ on which the film was based, and the beautiful late story ‘ Presence’, this collection offers a fresh perspective on the great writer and his work, here informed by an unusual sensuality and delicacy.
When Homely Girl, a Life was published in America the critic for the New York Times wrote of those three stories: ‘The ability to sum up in clear, unequivocal prose the essence of emotion, a situation, a theme – characteristic of Mr Miller’s best writing – makes the reader wish that these stories were longer, and that there were more of them.’ At last there are.
