WASHINGTON, 13 February 2005 — Arthur Miller could seem a bit dry in public, in the way that the heartbroken sometimes do. Yet there was always a shatteringly human frailty in his plays. Tears flowed copiously in their wake. A number of years ago, he was in his publisher’s office in Manhattan, where he was introduced to a writer from China. Told that she was face-to-face with the author of “The Crucible,’’ the woman broke down.

Miller, recalling the incident at a commemoration of his 80th birthday, said he asked the writer what had moved her so. “I couldn’t believe,’’ she replied, “a non-Chinese had written this play.’’

At performances of his masterpiece, “Death of a Salesman,’’ you could often look around the audience and see men in business suits weeping openly. Miller, the greatest social dramatist the US has produced — in fact, the country’s greatest living playwright until Thursday night — addressed big isms in his remarkable oeuvre — McCarthyism, Nazism, Capitalism.

His gifts, though, included a common touch. He loved and even ennobled the little guy, with all of — and because of — his flaws. In works tackling the loftiest subjects, he touched nerves so deep, it was as if the plays were customized arrows, aimed at the unique contours of each theatergoer’s heart.

Eight months shy of 90 years old, Miller died in his beloved farmhouse in Connecticut, the one he’d shared with his third wife, the late Inge Morath. Death does not diminish the memory of the man’s vigor. Feisty and opinionated, he believed ferociously in the power of the theater to assault the senses, invigorate debate and afflict the conscience.

“I thought he’d just go on and on,’’ a director who had worked with Miller on one of his later plays mused the other day, after hearing that the playwright was gravely ill. It’s a comfort, our fantasy that people of impressive longevity will always be around, but Miller’s ultra-long tenure in the public eye gave us an extra dose of encouragement. He was only 33 in 1949 when “Death of a Salesman’’ came to Broadway, in one of those seismic events that would shift the tectonic plates of the theater. Fifty-five years later, he was still going about the often painful business of debuting new work. The final premiere to be staged in his lifetime, of the presciently titled “Finishing the Picture,’’ made its bow at Chicago’s Goodman Theater last fall, with the kind of handsome roster (Scott Glenn, Frances Fisher, Matthew Modine, Stephen Lang, Linda Lavin) that reminded you of how hungry fine actors remain to speak Miller’s words.

He’d earned his seat in the first-class cabin of American theater, along with Eugene O’Neill, founding father of modern American drama; Tennessee Williams, the nation’s theatrical poet laureate; and Edward Albee, the brilliant absurdist. His life, however, was lived more conspicuously than any of these others, a life intertwined with the history of the American Century. There was the political turmoil of his contempt citation, issued by Congress in 1957 for his refusal to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee. (It was reversed on appeal.) There was the fascinating foray into Communist China in 1983, to supervise a nowlegendary production of “Death of a Salesman’’ in Chinese. There was his immersion in the civic life of the nation through groups such as PEN, the international writers’ organization, whose American chapter he headed in the 1960s. There was even a mythic unity of brains and beauty that fascinated the americans in his 1956 marriage to Marilyn Monroe. (The divorce came five years later.) Yes, it was an eventful 89 1/3 years.

For all the glamour and achievement, however, Miller nursed late into his life a sense of grievance over assessments of the significance of his work and the state of theater in general.

Much of his drama after the 1960s got a tepid reception from theater critics, and the merit of his more acclaimed plays has been questioned by some of the country’s eminent literary authorities. Commenting somewhat coolly on “Death of a Salesman’’ in 1988, the critic Harold Bloom wrote, “I myself resist the drama each time I reread it, because it seems that its language does not hold me, and then I see it played onstage ... and I yield to it.’’ Miller complained to sympathetic ears that he was never championed by a major critic. He was, in fact, prone to wounded exaggeration, for he received many notices that were bountiful valentines.

But he was more pained by what he seemed to view as a rejection by his peers of his dramatic values — in the intelligentsia’s gravitation to absurdism and nonlinear forms of drama, and Broadway’s ever-expanding embrace of frivolous, tourist-driven spectacle.

“We never did have, at least on Broadway, a whole lot of acerbic social commentary, but there was sometimes a steady trickle, which seems now to have dried up,’’ Miller wrote in a short 2003 essay in the New York Times.