• Born: 17 October 1915
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: 10 February 2005
• Best Known As: The author of Death of a Salesman

Playwright Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953). Miller grew up in New York City and began writing plays in the 1930s, while still a student at the University of Michigan. After graduating he returned to New York and wrote plays for the stage and for radio. Miller's plays addressed social and political issues and helped establish the American tradition of the "common man" as tragic hero. Death of a Salesman won three Tony awards and the Pulitzer Prize and made Miller internationally famous. In the 1950s Miller ran afoul of U.S. senator Joe McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee, and in 1957 he was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to name communist sympathizers (the conviction was later overturned). During his long career, Miller wrote novels, essays and short stories and was one of the most celebrated playwrights in America. He was also married to Marilyn Monroe (1956-61), for whom he wrote the screenplay to The Misfits (1961, also starring Clark Gable). His other plays include A View From the Bridge (1955), After the Fall (1964) and Broken Glass (1994).

Miller, Arthur (1915–2005), playwright. The New York–born dramatist studied at the University of Michigan, where he was a winner of the Avery Hopwood Award for playwriting. His first play to be produced was the short‐lived The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), but his subsequent dramas All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949) were widely lauded and continue to be frequently revived. Miller's version of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People (1950) received a mixed reaction, as did his tale of the Salem witch hunt, The Crucible (1953), which many saw as a thinly veiled indictment of McCarthyism. But the latter has proven to be one of the playwright's most respected and produced works. Miller's plays thereafter have been greeted with more interest than enthusiasm, yet each one contains elements of superb playwriting: the double bill of A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), the semiautobiographical After the Fall (1964), the political Incident at Vichy (1964), the domestic drama The Price (1968), the biblical comedy The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), the Great Depression panorama The American Clock (1980), the psychological drama Broken Glass (1994), the probing The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1998), and others. Miller began as a firmly committed leftist, whose political philosophizing sometimes got the better of his dramaturgy. However, at his best he is a master of creating potent situations, interesting characters, and powerful ideas. Autobiography: Timebends, 1987.

• Born: Oct 17, 1915
• Died: Feb 10, 2005
• Occupation: Writer, Actor
• Active: '60s, '80s-2000s
• Major Genres: Drama, History
• Career Highlights: The Misfits, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible
• First Major Screen Credit: Their Night Out (1933)

Biography

One of America's most renowned playwrights, Arthur Miller has had a number of his works adapted for the screen and has also served as a screenwriter and actor on occasion. Miller, who was born in New York City on October 17, 1915, and educated at the University of Michigan, first earned international acclaim and recognition in 1949 when his play, Death of a Salesman, won three Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. Salesman has since become one of the most popular plays in American theatre history, with numerous productions on both the stage and screen.

Another of Miller's most acclaimed works, The Crucible, was adapted for the screen by Miller himself in 1996. Written in 1953 as an allegory for the Communist witch hunts that were then raging across the U.S., the play was a very resonant one for Miller, himself summoned before the House of Un-American Activities Committee in 1957 to name names (he refused, and was found guilty of contempt toward Congress). The Crucible's 1996 film adaptation earned Miller two Best Adapted Screenplay nominations, from the American and British Academies.

On a more personal note, Miller also earned a certain amount of fame for his brief marriage to Marilyn Monroe, to whom he was married from 1956 to 1960. ~ Rebecca Flint, All Movie Guide

Focus Buy this Movie	Voices & Visions: William Styron Buy this Movie	The Crucible Buy this Movie	Broken Glass Buy this Movie
Bach In Auschwitz Buy this Movie	Sebastiao Salgado: Looking Back at You Buy this Movie	Everybody Wins Buy this Movie	An Enemy of the People Buy this Movie

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Arthur Miller (born 1915), "American playwright", novelist, and film writer, is considered one of the major dramatists of 20th-century American theater.

Arthur Miller was born on Oct. 17, 1915, in New York City. His father ran a small coat-manufacturing business; during the Depression it failed, and in 1932, after graduating from high school, Miller went to work in an auto-parts warehouse. Two years later he enrolled in the University of Michigan. Before graduating in 1938, he won two Avery Hopwood awards for playwriting.

Miller returned to New York City to a variety of jobs, writing for the Federal Theater Project, the Columbia Workshop, and the Cavalcade of America. Because of an old football injury, he was rejected for military service, but he toured Army camps to collect material for a movie, The Story of GI Joe, based on a book by Ernie Pyle. His journal of this tour was titled Situation Normal (1944). That same year the Broadway production of his The Man Who Had All the Luck opened and closed almost simultaneously, though it won a Theater Guild Award. In 1945 his novel, Focus, a diatribe against anti-Semitism, appeared.

With the opening of All My Sons on Broadway (1947), Miller's theatrical career burgeoned. The Ibsenesque tragedy won three prizes and fascinated audiences across the country. Then Death of a Salesman (1949) brought Miller a Pulitzer Prize, international fame, and an estimated income of $2 million. The words of its hero, Willy Loman, have been heard in at least 17 languages as well as on movie screens everywhere. By the time of his third Broadway play, The Crucible (1953), audiences were ready to accept Miller's conviction that "a poetic drama rooted in American speech and manners" was the only means of writing a tragedy out of the common man's life.

In these three plays Miller's subject was moral disintegration. His shifting from contemporary life in Salesman to the Salem witch hunt of 1692 in The Crucible hardly disguised the fact that he had in mind Senator Joseph McCarthy's investigations of Communist subversion in the United States and the subsequent persecutions and hysteria. When Miller was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in June 1956, he argued, "My conscience will not permit me to use the name of another person and bring trouble to him." He was convicted of contempt of Congress; the conviction was reversed in 1958.

Two one-act plays, A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), were social dramas focused on the inner life of working men; neither had the power of Salesman. Nor did his film script, The Misfits (1961). His next play, After the Fall (1964), was a bald excursion into self-analysis. His second wife, Marilyn Monroe, was the model for the heroine. Incident at Vichy (1965), a long one-act play based on a true story out of Nazi-occupied France, examined the nature of racial guilt and the depths of human hatreds; it is discursive exercise rather than highly charged theater.

In The Price (1968) Miller returned to domestic drama in a tight, intense confrontation between two brothers, almost strangers to each other, brought together by their father's death. It is Miller at the height of his powers, consolidating his position as a major American dramatist.

But The Price proved to be Miller's last major Broadway success. His next work, The Creation of the World and Other Business, was a series of comic sketches first produced on Broadway in 1972. It closed after only twenty performances. All of Miller's subsequent works premiered outside of New York. Miller staged the musical Up From Paradise (1974, an adaptation of his Creation of the World), at his alma mater, the University of Michigan. Another play, The Archbishop's Ceiling, was presented in 1977 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. In the 1980s, Miller produced a number of short pieces. The American Clock was based on author Studs Terkel's oral history of the Great Depression, Hard Times, and was structured as a series of vignettes that chronicle the hardship and suffering that occurred during the 1930s. Elegy for a Lady and Some Kind of Story were two one-act plays that were staged together in 1982. Miller's Danger, Memory! was composed of the short pieces I Can't Remember Anything and Clara. All these later plays have been regarded by critics as minor works. In the mid-1990s, Miller adapted The Crucible for the Academy Award-nominated film starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Joan Allen.

Despite the absence of any major success since the mid-1960s, Miller seems secure in his reputation as a major figure in American drama. He has won the Emmy, Tony, and Peabody awards, and in 1984 received the John F. Kennedy Award for Lifetime Achievement. Critics have hailed his blending of vernacular language, social and psychological realism, and moral insight. As the commentator June Schlueter has said, "When the twentieth century is history and American drama viewed in perspective, the plays of Arthur Miller will undoubtedly be preserved in the annals of dramatic literature."

Further Reading

Miller's Collected Plays was published in 1957, and a collection of his short stories, I Don't Need You Any More, in 1967. His Collected Plays, Volume II was published in 1980. The Portable Arthur Miller, which includes several of his major plays, was published in 1971. S.K. Bhatia's study Arthur Miller was published in 1985. See also C.W.E. Bigsby's A Critical Introductiion to Twentieth-Century American Drama, published in 1984. Partly biographical is Benjamin Nelson, Arthur Miller: Portrait of a Playwright (1970), although the focus is on the plays. Useful critical studies are Dennis Welland, Arthur Miller (1961); Sheila Huftel, Arthur Miller: The Burning Glass (1965); Leonard Moss, Arthur Miller (1967); and Edward Murray, Arthur Miller, Dramatist (1967). In addition to these sources, there are numerous Internet web sites devoted in whole or in part to Miller's life and works.

For more information on Arthur Miller, visit Britannica.com.

(1915- ), playwright. Miller has said that the object of his plays is to discover "the ultimate judgment lying upon us all." Drama must examine "social and moral problems, not simply psychology." Miller's reputation, in fact, was built on this attempt to judge "man's rightful position" according to objective standards of fair play, moral sanity, and the welfare of the community. Ironically, however, his strongest plays deliver his verdict while exploring the psychological mechanisms of radical self-assertion. His most fluent language expresses the negative personal consequences of ego-centered "fanaticism" rather than the positive public consequences of selfless "sacrifice." It is the unstable tension between these two poles that has given energy to Miller's work.

Miller grew up during the Great Depression, which aroused his indignation over social inequities and their crushing impact on ordinary citizens. These reactions are reflected in his early plays, such as All My Sons (1947), his only novel, Focus (1945), and minor works, such as The Misfits (1961).

His more substantial plays, however, focus on the motivation of individuals demanding self-respect, not the challenges to self-respect delivered by irrational social conditions. Death of a Salesman (1949), A View from the Bridge (1955), and After the Fall (1964) illustrate that focus. In The Crucible (1953), Incident at Vichy (1964), and The Price (1968) he tried, with partial success, to balance the two themes. Whatever the emphasis, Miller's goal has remained constant: serious drama, he maintains, shows "an individual fulfilling his subjective needs through social action."

To project this model, Arthur Miller experimented with several styles. Probably the most important is the realistic mode made legitimate by Henrik Ibsen, whom Miller admires. Miller's only technical weakness, not uncommon in Ibsen's plays, arises from his eagerness to spell out his "judgment," resulting in overexplicit rhetoric that often interrupts the more subtle interplay between "social and psychological mechanisms."

Miller's life embodies the penchant for justice that animates the plays. For one thing, he has traveled widely in order to observe foreign systems of government and report upon them. He has also engaged in political activities--for example, as a delegate to and critic of the Democratic National Conventions of 1968 and 1972. And he served as president of pen, an international activist association of poets, playwrights, essayists, and novelists (1965-1969).

He acquitted himself with honor during his interrogation in 1956 by the House Un-American Activities Committee, testifying that he had allied himself with liberal causes for many years but that he was not a communist and would not inform on others who might be. He was found guilty of contempt of Congress, but the verdict was reversed. Miller's belief that "you change society because you sharpen its consciousness" never wavered.

Miller's autobiography, Timebends, appeared in 1987. He has received many awards, including the New York Drama Critics Circle Award (All My Sons), the Pulitzer Prize (Death of a Salesman), the Antoinette Perry Award (The Crucible), and the Gold Medal for Drama, National Institute of Arts and Letters (1959). His wide social concerns and technical virtuosity, combining realistic, expressionist, and rhetorical styles, qualify him to be called America's most notable living dramatist.

Bibliography:

Arthur Miller, Timebends (1987); Leonard Moss, Arthur Miller (1980).

Author:

Leonard Moss

See also House Un-American Activities Committee; Theater.

1915–2005, American dramatist, b. New York City, grad. Univ. of Michigan, 1938. One of America's most distinguished playwrights, he has been hailed as the finest realist of the 20th-century stage. Miller's plays are, above all, concerned with morality as they reflect the individual's response to the manifold pressures exerted by the forces of family and society. Recurring themes of his major works involve the overwhelming importance of personal and social responsibility and the moral corruption that results from betraying the dictates of conscience.

Miller's masterpiece, Death of a Salesman (1949; Pulitzer Prize), is the story of a salesman betrayed by his own hollow values and those of American society. The Crucible (1953) is both a dynamic dramatization of the 17th-century Salem witch trials and a parable about the United States in the McCarthy era (see McCarthy, Joseph Raymond); it has been his most frequently produced work. In A View from the Bridge (1955; Pulitzer Prize) Miller studies a Sicilian-American longshoreman whose unacknowledged lust for his niece destroys him and his family. Miller's tumultuous life with his second wife, Marilyn Monroe, to whom he was married from 1956 to 1961, is fictionalized in his After the Fall (1964), and a barely disguised version of the glamorous but troubled actress also appears in his last play, Finishing the Picture (2004).

Miller's other plays include The Man Who Had All the Luck (1940), All My Sons (1947), Incident at Vichy (1965), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), The American Clock (1980), The Ride down Mount Morgan (1991), Broken Glass (1994), and Resurrection Blues (2002). He also wrote the screenplay for The Misfits (1961); the television dramas Playing for Time (1980) and Clara (1991); a novel, Focus (1945); and two books of short stories (1967, 2007). Miller's The Theater Essays (1971, rev. ed. 1996) is a collection of writings about the craft of playwriting and the nature of modern tragedy, and Echoes down the Corridor (2000) is a collection of essays (1944–2000), many of them autobiographical. He collaborated with his third wife, the photographer Inge Morath (1923–2002), on several books; their In Russia (1969) is a study of the Soviet Union.

Bibliography

See his autobiography, Timebends (1987); M. C. Roudane, Conversations with Arthur Miller (1987), S. Centola, Arthur Millar in Conversation (1993), M. Gussow, Conversations with Miller (2002); biography by M. Gottfried (2003); studies by B. Nelson (1970), R. Hayman (1972), J. J. Martine, ed. (1979), D. Welland (1979, repr. 1985), L. Moss (rev. ed. 1980), H. Bloom, ed. (1987), J. Schlueter and J. K. Flanagan (1987), N. Carson (1988), P. Singh (1990), S. R. Centola, ed. (1995), A. Griffin (1996), T. Otten (2002), C. Bigsby (2004), and E. Brater, ed. (2005).

(1915-2005)

1944	Situation Normal. Hired by the producer of the film G.I. Joe (1945) to gather research material for an honest, un-Hollywood depiction of military life, the twenty-nine-year-old playwright toured army camps and publishes his field notes in this collection, documenting the process of turning civilians into soldiers. Miller would later cowrite the screenplay.
1944	The Man Who Had All the Luck. Miller's playwriting debut concerns an auto mechanic's uncanny success in marriage and business. It is dismissed as "incredibly turbid in its writing and stuttering in its execution" and folds after only four performances. Raised in Brooklyn, Miller attended the University of Michigan and intended to work as a journalist before winning an Avery Hopwood Prize for his first dramatic script.
1945	Focus. Miller's only adult novel deals with anti-Semitism, as an American named Newman begins to wear glasses and is mistaken for a Jew, becoming the target of prejudice and persecution.
1947	All My Sons. Wartime corruption, family secrets, and moral accountability are the themes of Miller's drama about a manufacturer who knowingly sells defective parts to the military, causing planes to crash in battle. He is made to see the truth about his actions by his idealistic young son. The play establishes Miller as one of the most promising playwrights of his generation.
1949	Death of a Salesman. Willy Loman, an aging salesman "riding on a smile and a shoe shine," confronts the consequences of his career on the road in the decade's most acclaimed play. A lacerating portrait of a man, his family, and the concept of the American Dream, Miller's play wins the Pulitzer Prize and is widely regarded as one of the most significant accomplishments of the American theater.
1953	The Crucible. The parallels between the Salem witchcraft trials and the McCarthy hearings are inescapable in Miller's drama about John Proctor's decision whether to make a false confession and save himself or maintain his integrity. Running for only 197 performances on Broadway, the play would become one of Miller's most admired and frequently revived, filmed, and televised dramas.
1955	A View from the Bridge. Miller's drama about romance and revenge among Italian longshoremen premieres on Broadway as half of a double bill with A Memory of Two Mondays (1955). Miller would subsequently revise and expand the play, to be successfully presented off-Broadway in 1965 and revived on several occasions.
1961	The Misfits. Miller writes the screenplay for the John Huston film about a woman who comes to Nevada for a divorce and gets involved with cowboys herding horses for slaughter. It provides the last screen roles for Miller's then-wife Marilyn Monroe and film legend Clark Gable. The short story upon which Miller's screenplay is based would be published in his story collection I Don't Need You Anymore (1967).
1964	After the Fall. Miller's drama depicts a middle-aged lawyer trying to make sense of his life and his relationships with his mother, his first wife, and his prospective third wife. The drama has been viewed as an autobiographical probing of the playwright's failed marriage to actress Marilyn Monroe. Also produced is Incident at Vichy, about a group of Frenchmen arrested by the Nazis in 1942.
1968	The Price. Miller achieves a popular stage success in this powerful family drama depicting two brothers disposing of the family's possessions.
1972	The Creation of the World and Other Business. Miller's dramatic treatment of the Book of Genesis fails with both critics and audiences and closes quickly.
1977	The Archbishop's Ceiling. Performed at Washington's Kennedy Center, Miller's play is a response to Soviet treatment of dissident writers in which a prominent novelist must decide whether to choose exile or a treason trial.
1980	The American Clock. Set in Miller's familiar territory of 1930s Depression-era America, the play features documentary-style montages and vignettes that are meant to capture the spirit of the times in much the same way that Studs Terkel did in Hard Times. The play has no single plot line but rather is a collage of scenes, reminiscent of John Dos Passos's U.S.A.
1987	Danger: Memory! This work collects two one-act plays: I Can't Remember Anything and Clara. Each is performed at New York's Lincoln Center.
1987	Timebends. This autobiography is a cinematically constructed work, roaming back and forth between Miller's life and works--rather like a film with flashbacks, montages, and fades. He deals with his controversial leftist politics and his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, analyzing the mistakes he made in public and in private.
1992	The Ride Down Mount Morgan. First produced in London in 1991, Miller's play concerns a prosperous charismatic businessman caught in a farcical relationship with a first wife (whom he has not divorced) and a second; both reflect his unquenchable appetite and feeling that the law does not apply to him. Critics feel that Miller gets considerable humor out of this manic character while also exploring the mayhem created by overweening egos.
1993	The Last Yankee. This one-act play had debuted in 1991; revised and expanded, it runs at New York's Manhattan Theatre Club. Miller's drama is set in a mental hospital and deals with two woman suffering from clinical depression who are visited by their husbands.
1994	Broken Glass. Miller's first full-length play on Broadway since The American Clock (1984) explores the impact of the Holocaust from the perspective of the physical and sexual paralysis of a woman as a result of the persecution of Jews in Germany during and after Kristallnacht, the "night of broken glass," in November 1938.
1998	Mr. Peters' Connections. Written as the final play for New York's Signature Theater Company's 1997-1998 season, dedicated to Miller's work, the play takes place inside the protagonist's mind and concerns Mr. Peters's search for meaning in life.

Quotes:

"He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid."

"If I have any justification for having lived it's simply, I'm nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There's some value in that."

"Without alienation, there can be no politics."

"That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?"

"A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself."

"My conception of the audience is of a public each member of which is carrying about with him what he thinks is an anxiety, or a hope, or a preoccupation which is his alone and isolates him from mankind; and in this respect at least the function of a play is to reveal him to himself so that he may touch others by virtue of the revelation of his mutuality with them. If only for this reason I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone."

See more famous quotes by Arthur Miller