Miller, Arthur

Miller, Arthur (1915–2005), New York author, graduated from the University of Michigan (1938), where he began to write plays. His first, Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), treats an auto mechanic whose success in marriage and business is the result of work and care, and was followed by a nondramatic work of reportage, Situation Normal (1944), about military life at army bases, and Focus (1945), a novel about anti‐Semitism. He returned to the drama with All My Sons (1947), about a manufacturer whose defective airplane parts cause the death of his son and other aviators in wartime. His most impressive play is Death of a Salesman (1949, Pulitzer Prize), fusing realism and symbolism in reviewing the tragic life of a salesman victimized by his own false values and those of modern America. It was followed by The Crucible (1953), treating the Salem witch trials of 1692 as a parable for America during the era of McCarthyism, as the play probes into problems of individual conscience and guilt by association. A View from the Bridge (1955, Pulitzer Prize) presents two Italian longshoremen illegally in the U.S., and A Memory of Two Mondays, another short play included with it in production and publication, presents varied views of workers in a Manhattan warehouse. The Misfits (1961), a so‐called cinema‐novel, that is, fiction based on what the camera can see, is actually the script of a motion picture for his wife Marilyn Monroe, which deals with a beautiful woman in Nevada for a divorce who falls in with three men who herd old horses for slaughter and of her emotional relations with the men and feelings for the animals. After the Fall (1964) is a play in two long acts in which the quasi‐autobiographical protagonist seeks self‐knowledge, a sense of the meaning of his past and its meaning for his future as he reviews his marriages and other major experiences. Incident at Vichy (1965), a short play, concerns the treatment of diverse Frenchmen picked up by the Nazis in 1942. The Price (1968) is a play contrasting two brothers' views and ways of life as they meet after long separation to dispose of their parents' possessions. Later plays include The American Clock (1980), dealing with the Great Depression; Elegy for a Lady and Some Kind of Love, two one‐act plays both presented in 1982; and I Can't Remember Anything and Clara, two more one‐act plays that were produced together in 1987 as Danger: Memory! In 1990 a screenplay, Everybody Wins, was published. The Last Yankee was produced in 1993, a 70‐minute one‐acter set in a state mental institution that may be a metaphor for the U.S.A. in decline on all fronts—physical, moral, intellectual. In Broken Glass (1994), Miller attempts to connect the troubled lives of a middle‐aged Brooklyn Jewish couple and the wife's mysterious paralysis to the hysteria sweeping over Germany in 1938. I Don't Need You Anymore (1967) collects nine stories, including “The Misfits”; The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972) is a serio‐comic treatment of the book of Genesis; Theater Essays (1978) includes interviews. With his wife Inge Morath, a photographer, he has created books of text and pictures: In Russia (1969), In the Country (1977), set in rural Connecticut, and Chinese Encounters (1979). Salesman in Beijing (1984) is an account of producing his play in China in 1983. He made an adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People (1951). In 1987 his full autobiography Timebends, was published.