Arthur Miller

Born: October 17, 1915
New York, New York
American dramatist, novelist, and screenwriter

Best known for his play Death of a Salesman, American playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Arthur Miller is considered one of the major dramatists of twentieth-century American theater.

Early years

Arthur Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in New York City, the second of Isidore and Augusta Barnett Miller's three children. His father had come to the United States from Austria-Hungary and ran a small coat-manufacturing business. His mother, a native of New York, had been a public school teacher. Miller was only an average student. He was much more fond of playing sports than doing his schoolwork. Only after graduating from high school in 1932 did Miller think about becoming a writer, when he read Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky's (1821–1881) The Brothers Karamazov. Miller attended City College in New York for two weeks, then worked briefly with his father and in an autoparts warehouse to earn money to attend the University of Michigan. He enrolled there two years later, continuing to work as a dishwasher and as a night editor at a newspaper to help pay his expenses while he studied drama. He graduated in 1938, having won several awards for playwriting.

Miller returned to New York City to a variety of jobs, including writing for the Federal Theater Project, a government-sponsored program that ended before any of his work could be produced. Because of an old football injury, he was rejected for military service, but he was hired to tour army camps to collect material for a movie, The Story of G. I. Joe. His notes from these tours were published as Situation Normal (1944). That same year the Broadway production of his play The Man Who Had All the Luck opened, closing after four performances. In 1945 his novel Focus, an attack on anti-Semitism (the hatred of Jewish people), appeared.

Three successful plays

Miller's career blossomed with the opening of All My Sons on Broadway in 1947. The play, a tragedy (a drama having a sad conclusion), won three prizes and fascinated audiences across the country. Then Death of a Salesman (1949) brought Miller the Pulitzer Prize for drama, international fame, and an estimated income of two million dollars. The words of its hero, Willy Loman, have been heard in at least seventeen languages as well as on movie screens everywhere.

By the time of Miller's third Broadway play, The Crucible (1953), audiences were ready to accept his belief that "a poetic drama rooted in American speech and manners" was the only way to produce a tragedy out of the common man's life. The play was set in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, a time when many people were accused of being witches and were burned alive. Miller's play pointed out how similar those events were to Senator Joseph McCarthy's (1909–1957) investigations of anti-American activities during the early 1950s, which led to wild accusations against many public figures. Miller himself was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in June 1956 and was asked to give the names of guilty parties. He stated, "My conscience will not permit me to use the name of another person and bring trouble to him." He was convicted of contempt of (lack of respect for) Congress, but the conviction was reversed in 1958.

Hit-or-miss efforts

Two of Miller's 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 Death of a Salesman. Nor did his film script, The Misfits (1961). His next play, After the Fall (1964), was based on his own life. His second wife, actress Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962), was the model for one of the characters. Incident at Vichy (1965), a long, one-act play based on a true story set in France during World War II (1939–45; when Germany, Italy, and Japan battled France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States), examined the nature of guilt and the depth of human hatred. In The Price (1968) Miller returned to domestic drama in his portrayal of a tight, intense struggle between two brothers, almost strangers to each other, brought together by their father's death. It is Miller at the height of his powers, cementing 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 works after that premiered outside of New York. Miller staged the musical Up From Paradise (1974) at 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 Studs Terkel's (1912–) history of the Great Depression (a slump in the country's system of producing, distributing, and using goods and services that led to almost half of the industrial workers in the country losing their jobs 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 of these later plays have been regarded by critics as minor works. In the mid-1990s Miller adapted The Crucible for a film version starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Joan Allen.

Later years

Despite the absence of any major successes since the mid-1960s, Miller seems secure in his reputation as a major figure in American drama. In addition to his Pulitzer Prize in 1949, his awards include the Theatre Guild National Prize, 1944; Antoinette Perry (Tony) Award (given for achievement in the theater), 1947 and 1953; Emmy Award (given for achievement in television broadcasting), 1967; George Foster Peabody Award, 1981; John F. Kennedy Award for Lifetime Achievement, 1984; Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, 1999; National Book Foundation lifetime achievement award, 2001; New York City College Alumni Association medal for artistic devotion to New York, 2001; and the Japan Art Association lifetime achievement award, 2001.

For More Information

Bigsby, C. W. E. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Glassman, Bruce. Arthur Miller. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Silver Burdett Press, 1990.

Miller, Arthur. Timebends: A Life. New York: Grove Press, 1987. Reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1995.

Schlueter, June, and James K. Flanagan. Arthur Miller. New York: Ungar, 1987.

Arthur Miller

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. □

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.

Arthur Miller 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 Miller in Conversation (1993), M. Gussow, Conversations with Miller (2002); biographies by M. Gottfried (2003) and C. Bigsby (2008); J. Meyers, The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe (2010); 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).

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.

Miller, Arthur (1915–2005), American playwright, born in New York and educated at the University of Michigan. He made his name with All My Sons (1947) and established himself as a leading dramatist with Death of a Salesman (1949), in which a travelling salesman, Willy Loman, is brought to disaster by accepting the false values of contemporary society. This was followed by other plays including The Crucible (1952), in which the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 are used as a parable for McCarthyism in America in the 1950s; A View from the Bridge (1955), a tragedy of family honour and revenge; The Misfits (1961), a screenplay written for his then wife, Marilyn Monroe; After the Fall (1964); The Price (1968); Playing for Time (1981); Broken Glass (1994); and Resurrection Blues (2002). He has also published short stories and essays, and adapted Ibsen's An Enemy of the People (1951). Although most of Miller's plays are set in contemporary America, and on the whole offer a realistic portrayal of life and society, the overtones from Ibsen and Greek tragedy are frequently conspicuous, and the theme of self-knowledge and self-realization is recurrent.

Miller, Arthur (1915– ) US dramatist. Miller's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Death of a Salesman (1949) is a masterpiece of 20th-century theatre: an egocentric salesman, Willy Loman, has unrealistic aspirations, which he struggles to articulate. The Crucible (1953) is both a dramatic reconstruction of the Salem witch trials and a parable of the McCarthy era. Miller won a second Pulitzer Prize for A View From the Bridge (1955). Married (1955–61) to Marilyn Monroe, Miller wrote the screenplay for her film The Misfits (1961). After the Fall (1964) is a fictionalized account of their relationship. Other plays include All My Sons (1947), Playing for Time (1981), and The Ryan Interview (1995).