About this Item
First edition, first printing. Presentation copy, signed and inscribed by Miller to American theater critic and editor Otis Guernsey Jr. on front free endpaper: "For Otis Guernsey / With my respect / Arthur Miller." Publisher's red cloth and red patterned boards, with spine lettered in white; in the original black dust jacket designed by Robert Hallock, with a red bridge illustration to the front panel, lettered in white and red. About fine book, with some offsetting to endpapers, and a couple of small bumps to board edges; good or better unclipped dust jacket, with light fading to spine, a couple of minor scratches to front panel, light soiling to spine and rear panel, small closed tear to bottom edge of rear panel, and light spotting to jacket flaps. Overall, a great presentation copy. From Otis Guernsey Jr.'s personal library. A View from the Bridge tells the story of Italian American Eddie Carbone as he harbors two family members who have immigrated to the United States illegally. The play first appeared as a one-act play alongside A Memory of Two Mondays, and was produced by Martin Ritt on September 29, 1955 at the Coronet Theatre in New York. Despite Miller's reverence for the format of the one-act play, he later revised and extended A View From a Bridge so that it consisted of two acts. Otis Guernsey Jr. (1918 - 2001) was an influential American theater critic and editor, who worked at the New York Herald Tribune for 19 years (1941 - 1960), moving up the ranks from copy boy to drama critic and arts editor. From 1964 to 2000, he edited 36 volumes of the highly respected Best Plays Theater Yearbook series and released highly regarded annual lists of his 10 favorite plays of the year. A member of the New York Drama Critics Circle, Pulitzer Committee for Drama, and Tony Award nominating committee, he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 2001. Otis Guernsey Jr. was a big proponent of Miller's work. In a New York Times article, he's quoted as saying that Miller's Death of a Salesman is "the best play written in my lifetime." Elaborating, he says, "'It shocked us all to realize that the American dream was not enough and that we never found what it was we should be pursuing" (Dec. 22, 1987). He also helped bring Death of a Salesman to television in 1966 while serving as a CBS consultant.
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