For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake.
—Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

For Willy Loman’s creator, Arthur Miller, they haven’t been smiling back for three decades. Broadway’s lousy territory, and so’s Hollywood, and for the most part he’s retreated to London, where the disinterest of his native land is seen merely as confirmation of his status. As Miller likes to tell fawning British interviewers, “In New York they have shows, but in London you still have plays.” Yet here he is, pushing eighty-four, back in what he would no doubt call, with his quaintly stilted vernacular, “the show business.” He smiles out from my daily paper, standing ...

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