Arthur Miller

Arthur Asher Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in the Harlem section of Manhattan, the second of three children of Isidore and Augusta Miller. His father, a Polish Jewish immigrant, ran a prosperous coat manufacturing business, and the family lived comfortably on 110th Street facing Central Park, complete with a chauffeur and a summer bungalow at the beach ^[1].

That comfort collapsed with the stock market crash of 1929. The coat business failed, and the Millers moved to a small house in the Gravesend neighborhood of Brooklyn, where Arthur shared a bedroom with his grandfather. The experience of watching his father's confidence drain away during the Depression marked him for life, and echoes of that fall from security run through nearly everything he later wrote ^[1][2].

Miller was an indifferent student at Abraham Lincoln High School, more interested in football than books. After graduating in 1932 he worked a string of jobs, most memorably as a clerk in an automobile parts warehouse on Tenth Avenue in Manhattan, saving thirteen dollars a week toward college tuition. During this period he read The Brothers Karamazov on the subway, an encounter he later credited with convincing him that he wanted to be a writer ^[2].

The University of Michigan admitted Miller in 1934 after initially rejecting him for weak grades. In Ann Arbor he studied journalism, worked as a reporter and night editor on the student paper, and switched his major to English. More importantly, he began writing plays, and he twice won the university's Avery Hopwood Award for student drama, prizes that came with cash he badly needed ^[1][3].

After earning his degree in 1938, Miller returned to New York and joined the Federal Theatre Project shortly before Congress shut it down. He supported himself writing radio scripts for programs such as Columbia Workshop while working on stage plays at night. A football injury from his school days kept him out of military service during the Second World War, and he instead gathered material for the screenplay research that became his 1944 reportage book Situation Normal ^[2][3].

His Broadway debut came that same year with The Man Who Had All the Luck, which closed after four performances. The failure stung, but Miller answered it with a novel about antisemitism, Focus, published in 1945, and then with the play that changed his fortunes. All My Sons, a drama about a manufacturer who sold defective aircraft parts during the war, opened on Broadway in January 1947 under the direction of Elia Kazan. It ran for nearly a year and won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, establishing Miller, at thirty one, as a serious new voice ^[1][4].

Anyone asking who was Arthur Miller usually arrives first at Death of a Salesman. Written in a matter of weeks in a small studio Miller built himself in Roxbury, Connecticut, the play opened at the Morosco Theatre on February 10, 1949, again directed by Kazan, with Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman. The story of an aging traveling salesman clinging to a hollow dream of success struck audiences with unusual force. It ran for 742 performances and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Tony Award for Best Play, and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, a sweep few American plays have matched ^[1][4].

The Crucible followed in 1953. Set during the Salem witch trials of 1692, it drew an unmistakable parallel to the anticommunist investigations then consuming Washington, and its initial Broadway reception was cooler than that of Salesman. Time vindicated it: The Crucible eventually became Miller's most frequently produced play worldwide and a standard text in schools across the English speaking world ^[1][5]. A View from the Bridge, his tragedy of a Brooklyn longshoreman destroyed by obsession and betrayal, premiered in 1955 and was expanded into its familiar two act form for London in 1956 ^[4].

Miller's own confrontation with the machinery he had dramatized came in June 1956, when the House Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed him. He spoke openly about his own past attendance at meetings of communist writers but refused to name anyone else who had been present. Congress cited him for contempt in 1957; he was convicted, fined, and given a suspended sentence, and a federal appeals court overturned the conviction in 1958. His refusal to inform, in pointed contrast to the cooperative testimony of his former collaborator Kazan, became a defining act of his public life ^[1][6].

Among later Arthur Miller achievements were the plays After the Fall and Incident at Vichy in 1964, The Price in 1968, and the screenplay for The Misfits, the 1961 John Huston film starring Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe. He also served from 1965 to 1969 as president of PEN International, the worldwide writers' association, using the office to campaign for imprisoned and censored authors ^[3][6].

Miller married three times. His first wife was Mary Grace Slattery, whom he met at Michigan and married in 1940; they had two children, Jane and Robert, before divorcing in 1956 ^[2].

Days after that divorce he married Marilyn Monroe, then the most famous film actress in the world. The union of the celebrated intellectual and the Hollywood star fascinated the press and put Miller under relentless scrutiny, which intensified when his HUAC subpoena arrived the same month as the wedding. He wrote The Misfits partly as a gift for Monroe, but the marriage frayed during its difficult production and ended in divorce in January 1961. Monroe died the following year ^[1][6].

In 1962 Miller married the Austrian born photographer Inge Morath, a member of the Magnum agency whom he had met on the set of The Misfits. Their partnership lasted forty years, until her death in 2002, and produced several collaborative books pairing her photographs with his text, including In Russia and Chinese Encounters. They had two children: Rebecca, born in 1962, who became a filmmaker and married the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, and Daniel, born in 1966 with Down syndrome and placed in institutional care, a decision that remained almost entirely absent from Miller's public accounts of his life and drew criticism when it was reported after his death ^[6][7].

American critics grew harder on Miller from the late 1960s onward, and several of his new plays, including The Creation of the World and Other Business in 1972 and The American Clock in 1980, had short Broadway runs. British theater proved more hospitable. London stages mounted major revivals and premieres of his later work, and Miller often remarked on the warmth of his English reception compared with the reviews he received at home ^[3][5].

He kept writing steadily from his farm in Roxbury, Connecticut, where he had lived since the 1950s and where he enjoyed carpentry, building much of his own furniture. His autobiography Timebends appeared in 1987, an unconventional memoir organized by memory rather than chronology. In 1983 he traveled to Beijing to direct Death of a Salesman at the People's Art Theatre, an experience he recorded in the book Salesman in Beijing ^[2][3].

Recognition accumulated in his final decades: the Kennedy Center Honors in 1984, the National Medal of Arts in 1993, the Praemium Imperiale in 2001, and the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in 2002. A fiftieth anniversary Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman in 1999, with Brian Dennehy as Willy Loman, won the Tony Award for Best Revival and confirmed the play's undimmed power. Miller's last new play, Finishing the Picture, drawn from the making of The Misfits, opened in Chicago in 2004. He died of heart failure at his Roxbury home on February 10, 2005, at the age of 89, fifty six years to the day after Death of a Salesman had opened on Broadway ^[1][8].

Miller belongs, with Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams, to the small group of dramatists who defined serious American theater in the twentieth century. His central conviction, argued in the 1949 essay Tragedy and the Common Man, was that an ordinary person could carry the full weight of tragedy, and Willy Loman became the proof. Death of a Salesman has never left the world repertory, revived on Broadway repeatedly and translated into dozens of languages ^[1][5].

The Crucible gave the English language a durable shorthand: the phrase witch hunt, filtered through Salem, remains the standard metaphor for persecution by accusation. The play's endurance in classrooms and on stages keeps each new generation arguing about conscience, conformity, and the price of a name. Miller himself adapted it for the 1996 film starring Daniel Day-Lewis, earning an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay ^[5][6].

Institutions carry his name forward. The Arthur Miller Foundation supports theater education in New York City public schools, and the University of East Anglia in England houses the Arthur Miller Institute for American Studies. His archive resides at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which acquired his papers, thousands of pages of drafts, journals, and correspondence ^[7][8]. Among the more striking Arthur Miller facts is the simple persistence of demand: decades after their premieres, his major plays are staged somewhere in the world on almost any given night, evidence that his questions about integrity, responsibility, and self deception have not aged.