Arthur Miller

Arthur Asher Miller (October 17 1915 – February 10 2005) was an American playwright, essayist, and author. He was a prominent figure in American literature and cinema for over 61 years, writing a wide variety of plays, including The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, All My Sons, and Death of a Salesman, which are still studied^[1] and performed^[2] worldwide. Miller was often in the public eye, most famously for refusing to give evidence before the House Un-American Activities Committee, being the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama among other awards, and because of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe. At the time of his death Miller was considered one of the greatest American playwrights of all time.

Arthur Miller, the son of moderately affluent Jewish-American parents, Isidore and Augusta Miller,^[3] was born in Harlem, New York City in 1915. His father owned a coat-manufacturing business, which failed in the Wall Street Crash of 1929,^[4] after which his family moved to humbler quarters in Brooklyn.^[5]

Because of the effects of the Great Depression on his family, Miller had no money to attend a university in 1932 after he had graduated from high school.^[5] After securing a place at the University of Michigan, Miller worked in a number of menial jobs to pay for his tuition.^[4]

At the University of Michigan, Miller first majored in journalism, where he became the reporter and night editor on the student paper, The Michigan Daily. It was during this time that he wrote his first work, No Villain.^[6] After winning the Avery Hopwood Award for No Villain, Miller switched his major to English, where he met Professor Kenneth Rowe, who aided Miller with his early experiences of playwriting.^[7] Miller retained strong ties to his alma mater throughout the rest of his life, establishing the Arthur Miller Award in 1985 and Arthur Miller Award for Dramatic Writing in 1999, and lending his name to the Arthur Miller Theatre in 2000.^[8] In 1937, Miller wrote Honors at Dawn, which also received the Avery Hopwood Award.^[6]

In 1938, Miller received his bachelor's degree in English. After graduation, he joined the Federal Theater Project, a New Deal agency established to provide jobs in the theater. He chose the theater project although he had an offer to work as a scriptwriter for 20th Century Fox.^[6] However, Congress, worried about possible Communist infiltration, closed the project.^[5] Miller began working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard while continuing to write radio plays, some of which were broadcast on CBS.^[5][6]

On August 5 1940, he married his college sweetheart, Mary Slattery, the Catholic daughter of an insurance salesman.^[9] The couple had two children, Jane and Robert (a director, writer and producer whose body of work includes producer of the 1996 movie version of The Crucible^[10]).

Miller was exempted from military service during World War II because of a high-school football injury to his left kneecap.^[5]

In 1944 Miller wrote The Man Who Had All the Luck, which was produced in New York, and won the Theatre Guild's National Award.^[11] Despite this however, the play closed after only six performances.^[6] The next few years were quite difficult for Miller: He published his first novel, Focus, to little acclaim, and adapted George Abbott's and John C. Holm's Three Men on a Horse for the radio.^[6]

However, in 1947, Miller's All My Sons was produced at the Coronet Theatre. The play was directed by Elia Kazan, with whom Miller would have a continuing professional and personal relationship, and ran for three hundred and twenty-eight performances.^[9] All My Sons won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award^[12] and two Tony Awards^[13] in 1947, despite receiving criticism for being unpatriotic.^[4]

It was in 1948 where Miller built a small studio in Roxbury, Connecticut, a place that was to be his long time home, where he would, within the space of six weeks, write Death of a Salesman,^[6] the work for which he is best known.^[14][5]

Death of a Salesman premiered on February 10 1949, at the Morocco Theatre, New York City, directed by Kazan, and starring Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman. The play was a huge critical success, winning a Tony Award for best play^[15] , a New York Drama Critics' Award,^[12] and a Pulitzer Prize,^[16][17] and ran for seven hundred and forty-two performances.^[5]

In 1952, Elia Kazan appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and, under fear of being blacklisted from Hollywood, named eight people from the Group Theatre, who, in the 1930s, along with himself, had been members of the American Communist Party.^[18]

After speaking with Kazan about his testimony^[19] Miller traveled to Salem, Massachusetts to research the witch trials of 1692.^[9] The Crucible, a parable play in which Miller likened the situation with the House Un-American Activities Committee to the witchhunt in Salem,^[20] opened at the Beck Theatre on Broadway on January 22 1953. Though widely considered unsuccessful at the time of its initial release, today The Crucible is one of Miller's most frequently-produced works.^[9] Miller and Kazan had been close friends throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, but after Kazan's testimony to HUAC, the pair's friendship ended, and they did not speak to each other for the next ten years.^[18] It was not long, however, before HUAC took an interest in Miller, denying him a passport to attend the Belgian opening of The Crucible in 1954.^[6]

In 1955 a one-act version of Miller's verse drama, A View From The Bridge, opened on Broadway in a joint bill with one of Miller's lesser-known plays, A Memory of Two Mondays. The following year, Miller returned to A View from the Bridge, revising it into a two-act version, which Peter Brook produced in London.^[6]

In June of 1956, Miller divorced Mary Slattery, and, on June 29, married Marilyn Monroe.^[9] Miller and Monroe first met one another in 1951, when they had a brief affair ^{[citation needed]}, and remained in contact since then.^[5]

Taking advantage of the publicity of Miller's marriage, HUAC subpoenaed him to appear before the committee shortly before the nuptials. Before appearing, Miller asked the committee not to ask him to name names, to which the chairman agreed.^[21] When Miller attended the hearing, to which Monroe accompanied him, risking her own career,^[9] he gave the committee a detailed account of his political activities. Reneging on the chairman's promise, the committee asked him to reveal to them names of friends and colleagues who had partaken in similar activities.^[21] Miller refused to comply with the request, saying "I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him."^[21]

Because of his refusal, in May 1957 a judge found Miller guilty of contempt of Congress. Miller was fined $500, sentenced to thirty days in prison, blacklisted, and disallowed a U.S. passport.^[3] In 1958, however, his conviction was overturned by the court of appeals, ruling that Miller was misled by the chairman of HUAC.^[3]

After his conviction was overturned, Miller began work on The Misfits, which starred his wife. Miller said that the filming was one of the lowest points in his life,^[9] and shortly before the film's premier in 1961, the pair divorced.^[6]

Miller married photographer Inge Morath on 17 February 1962; they remained together until her death.^[6] The first of their two children, Rebecca, was born that September.

It was in 1964 that Miller's next play, released seven years after his last, was produced. After the Fall is a deeply personal view of Miller's own experiences during his marriage to Monroe, which reunited Miller with his former friend Kazan, with whom he collaborated on the script, and on the direction of the play. After the Fall opened on January 23 1964 at the Anta Theatre in Washington Square Park amid a flurry of publicity and outrage at putting a Monroe character, called Maggie, on stage.^[9] Also in the same year, Miller produced Incident at Vichy. In 1965, Miller was elected International PEN's president, the organization’s first American president, a position which he held for four years.^[22] Miller is often credited as the person who changed PEN from being a literary group to what he called, "the conscience of the world writing community."^[5] In the late 1960s Miller dedicated much of his time to campaigning against the Vietnam War, leading an American group of writers to Paris in 1968, with a proposal to stop the war. His dislike of the Vietnam War never appeared in Miller's work, however, his only full-length play of the period being the family comedy, The Price, produced in 1968,^[9] which was Miller's most successful play since Death of a Salesman.^[23]

After retiring as President of PEN in 1969, Miller's works were banned in the Soviet Union after he campaigned for the freedom of dissident writers.^[6] Throughout the 1970s, Miller spent a lot of his time experimenting with the theatre, producing one-act plays such as Fame and The Reason Why and traveling with his wife, producing In The Country and Chinese Encounters with her. In 1983, Miller traveled to the People's Republic of China to produce and direct Death of a Salesman at the People's Art Theatre, in Beijing. The play was a success in China^[23] and, in 1984, Salesman in Beijing, a book about Miller's experience in Beijing, was published. In late 1987, Miller's autobiography, Timebends was published. While it was generally accepted before Timebends was published that Miller would not talk about Monroe in interviews, Miller's autobiography talked about his experiences with Monroe in detail.^[9] During the early 1990s, Miller wrote three new plays, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1992), and Broken Glass (1994). In 1996, a film of The Crucible, starring Daniel Day Lewis and Winona Ryder opened. Miller had spent much of 1996 working on the screenplay to the film.^[6] Death of a Salesman was revived on Broadway in 1999 to celebrate its 50th anniversary. The play, once again, was a large critical success, winning a Tony Award for best revival of a play.^[24] On May 1 2002, Miller was awarded Spain's Principe de Asturias Prize for Literature as "the undisputed master of modern drama." Previous winners include Doris Lessing, Günter Grass and Carlos Fuentes. Later that year, Ingeborg Morath, died of Lymphatic cancer^[25][26] at the age of 78. The following year Miller won the Jerusalem Prize.^[6] In December 2004, the 89 year old Miller announced that he has been living with then-34 year old artist Agnes Barley at his Connecticut farm since 2002, and that they intended to marry. Miller's final play, Finishing the Picture, opened at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago, in the fall of 2004. He openly admitted that the work was based on the filming of The Misfits. Miller died of congestive heart failure^[27] on the evening of February 10 2005, on the 56th anniversary of the Broadway debut of Death of a Salesman. He died at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut.

Miller's career as a writer spanned over six decades, and at the time of his death in 2005, Miller was considered to be one of the greatest dramatists of the twentieth century, among the likes of Eugene O'Neill, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertolt Brecht, and Tennessee Williams.^[14] After his death, many respected actors, directors, and producers paid tribute to Miller,^[28] some calling him the last great practicioner of the American stage, ^[29] and Broadway theaters darkened their lights in a show of respect.^[30]

• Hollywood blacklist
• McCarthyism
• House Un-American Activities Committee
• International PEN
• Christopher Bigsby

Arthur Miller by Leonard Moss. (Boston: Twayne Publishers), 1980.

Wikiquote has quotations related to Arthur Miller.

• Arthur Miller at the Internet Broadway Database
• Arthur Miller at IMDb
• Arthur Miller Society
• Arthur Miller at Monologue Search
• New York Times Obituary
• CNN Obituary
• BBC Obituary
• PBS: Arthur Miller
• Miller interview, Humanities, March-April 2001
• Miller interview, The Paris Review, summer 1966
• Arthur Miller at Curlie
• A Visit With Castro - Miller's article in The Nation., January 12 2004
• Chronology of Arthur Miller
• A Literary Life: Arthur Miller - Playwright and Protagonist, Steve Newman
• Biography of Arthur Miller

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