“HE SPOKE and still speaks to the world,” Christopher Bigsby declares in his biography of Arthur Miller; and no one has done more to ensure that permanence. He is the founding director of the Miller Centre for American Studies at the University of East Anglia; he's written a 470-page critical study of the dramatist; he was his champion at times, notably the 1980s and 1990s, when Miller was far less honoured in New York than London. He has penetrated so far inside Miller's skin that I fully expect to meet him craggily smoking a pipe and parading blonde arm candy, like the playwright at the height of his fame.

Only a bio of his friend and hero was missing. But the belated book proves well worth the wait and, indeed, the weight, for its 739 pages tip my kitchen scales at almost 3lb. My fear was that it would be heavy in another sense, but, no, I wasn't bored even during the account of Miller's part in the so-called “Waldorf Conference” of 1949, a Soviet-inspired event that finally convinced America that he was a dangerous leftist. Bigsby eschews academic pontification for a scrupulously researched yet rivetingly readable account of a Jewish-American life that also tells us plenty about a century that Miller called “probably the worst in history”.

Actually, Bigsby ends in the early 1960s, with Miller's visit to a concentration camp with his third wife, the Austrian photographer Inge Morath, hopping as an afterthought to his death in 2005. Perhaps he'll give us a second volume. But all the formative events are here, starting with the Depression, which destroyed Miller's father's clothing business, forced his family to live in relative penury, and terminally embittered his more cultured mother. That “moral catastrophe”, as he called it, combined with the Spanish Civil War to convert Miller to a Marxism that was always less an ideol-ogy than a mix of passionate egalitarianism and ardent anti-fascism.

Miller was a poor student, unlike his older brother Kermit, who emerges as something of a saint, dropping out of NYU to help his father, suffering physical and mental damage in the Second World War, yet always uncomplainingly supportive of Arthur, who wangled his way into the University of Michigan and was rejec-ted by the army because of a sports injury. And so to prizes for playwriting as an undergraduate, a first marriage to Mary Slattery, a politically radical fellow student, the difficult years in New York that culminated in the Broadway flop of his The Man Who Had All the Luck, triumph with All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, and two pivotal disasters: harassment by the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC) and the years with Marilyn Monroe. “The most unlikely marriage since the Owl and the Pussycat,” remarked Life magazine when they separated in 1960, and, yes, Miller's donnish and Monroe's feline selves were bound to clash.

1961: Mr Arthur Miller's film of black despair

Miss Marilyn Munroe, given a completely impossible part to play, makes it credible by the sheer strength of her own passionate identification with the character

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Yet he did yearn to escape a cold, sexless first marriage and she longed for the stability and culture that he seemed to offer. Also, there was genuine love there, at least until her desperate neediness and paranoia surfaced when she made The Prince and the Showgirl with an increasingly alienated Olivier and, worse, when drugs combined with rage on the set of The Misfits, the film Miller wrote for her while denying himself (and, sadly, us) by neglecting the stage.

This book is no hagiography. Bigsby's regard for Miller is never in doubt, but he has his critical passages. Though the dramatist seems never formally to have joined the party, he somewhat justified accusations of Stalinism by failing to renounce Soviet communism until the 1950s. And compared with the majestically aggressive Paul Robeson, Miller proved almost obsequious before the HUAC. Far from telling those “bastards” to “f*** themselves”, as Marilyn suggested, he assured them he'd write more “positively” about America. But who cared when he did the morally memorable thing, refusing to “name names” and so incurring endless troubles, among them a period on probation that required the always rather puritan Miller to “live a clean and temperate life”?

Bigsby's original achievements include publishing extracts from FBI files (All My Sons being “an

indictment of money-making” and “pernicious political propaganda”) and at long last naming the only names Miller could remember: the Lampells, a harmless Jewish couple already known to the HUAC. He also brings to life what Lillian Hellman called “scoundrel time”, with its Stasi-like informants, its blacklistings and persecutions that, in Miller's case, included bans, rejections and a refusal to renew his passport. If he misses anything, it's Miller's dryly hilarious sense of humour.

So what profile emerges? I was struck by how often the word “guilt” recurs: for Kermit's sacri-fices, for the friend killed in a Spanish war Miller didn't fight, for his marital failures, and much more. But guilt generated a sense of responsibility, which generated the principled man who spent the war labouring in Brooklyn's shipyards and the dramatist who explored right and wrong, justice and injustice, with such power. Couldn't Bigsby give us a second volume that embraces Vietnam, Miller's crusading presidency of PEN, et al? If it stretched to another 739 pages, that would be fine by me.

Arthur Miller: The Definitive Biography by Christopher Bigsby
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £30 Buy the book

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