Sad news today: Another passing from the 20th Century American intellectual landscape. « Playwright Arthur Miller, 89, is dead »:

‘Arthur Miller, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright whose most famous fictional creation, Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman,” came to symbolize the American Dream gone awry, has died. He was 89. Miller, who had been hailed as America’s greatest living playwright, died Thursday night at his home in Roxbury of heart failure, his assistant, Julia Bolus, said Friday. His family was at his bedside, she said. His plays, with their strong emphasis on family, morality and personal responsibility, spoke to the growing fragmentation of American society. “A lot of my work goes to the center of where we belong — if there is any root to life — because nowadays the family is broken up, and people don’t live in the same place for very long,” Miller said in a 1988 interview. “Dislocation, maybe, is part of our uneasiness. It implants the feeling that nothing is really permanent.”

A very apropos quote.