“In the end it is hard to see Miller as anything other than a second-string tragedian, a sentimentalist who mistook ideas for art and windiness for poetry. Small wonder, then, that the commercial theater, with its bottomless appetite for the obvious, welcomed him as a modern master–and that many of the sharpest critical minds of his own time begged to disagree…”

“It was the self-evident uneasiness in his own skin that helped to make Guinness more than just an uncommonly gifted actor. The characters he played came over time to be seen as symbols of England’s own postwar uncertainties, sharply drawn parodies of a fearful middle class that continued to cling to the empty shell of manners in order to ward off its final demise…”

“A half-century ago, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams were universally reckoned the finest American dramatists of the postwar era. They still are. In 1959, however, the short list also included William Inge, and there were those who ranked Inge higher than either of his contemporaries. He was certainly more successful than Miller or Williams, both of whom already had notably uneven track records on Broadway…”

“After she died, Thomas Merton wrote that ‘when I read Flannery O’Connor, I do not think of Hemingway, or Katherine Anne Porter, or Sartre, but rather of someone like Sophocles.’ Though O’Connor herself would surely have scoffed at such praise, she is among a bare handful of American writers, modern or otherwise, of whom such a thing might plausibly be said…”