Arthur Miller’s daughter and local supporters are working to save his Roxbury ‘sanctuary’

Playwright Arthur Miller (pictured here in 1963) wrote some of his most iconic works in this small shed. Efforts are underway to restore and preserve the shack, which fell into disrepair after Miller’s death. In the waning days of his life, Arthur Miller, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, insisted on being at his Roxbury home as the end drew near. An urban intellect for much of his adult life, Miller had increasingly found solace amid the rural charm of a New England town that had been attracting New York’s creative elites for decades. Though his property on Tophet Road stretched more than 325 acres and included an 18th-century farmhouse, Miller’s most treasured spot was tucked away behind the main house. There, amid a dense forest of trees and a narrow brook, sat a modest, 300-square-foot writing studio that Miller had built shortly after buying the property with his second wife, Marilyn Monroe, in 1958. “My father wrote in the studio every morning and some afternoons,” says Miller’s daughter, Rebecca, the filmmaker and novelist who profiled her father in the 2018 HBO documentary Arthur Miller: Writer . “It was Arthur’s sanctum,” she says. Those were some of his most productive years as a writer. Miller penned more than a dozen stage plays inside that studio, including After the Fall and Playing for Time . It was also where he wrote screenplays for The Crucible and The Misfits , a film that starred Monroe and Clark Gable. His autobiography, Timebends , was also written in the cedar-shingle studio. Despite its literary significance, the studio sits in a far less exalted location today: propped up in a roadside municipal parking lot in Roxbury alongside a dumpster and truck plows. It was moved there a few years ago, more than a decade after the writer’s death in 2005, by Rebecca Miller, with the idea of eventually donating it to the town of Roxbury. It’s sat there ever since. And while the playwright’s place in the pantheon of American literature has long been secure, his writing studio remains in limbo. Efforts are underway to restore […]

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