Arthur Miller
Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright, essayist and screenwriter in the 20th-century American theater. Among his most popular plays are All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), and A View from the Bridge (1955). He wrote several screenplays, including The Misfits (1961). The drama Death of a Salesman is considered one of the best American plays of the 20th century.
For other people named Arthur Miller, see Arthur Miller (disambiguation).
Arthur Miller
Arthur Asher Miller
October 17, 1915
New York City, U.S.
February 10, 2005 (aged 89)
Roxbury, Connecticut, U.S.
- Playwright
- essayist
- screenwriter
- 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
- 1984 Kennedy Center Honors
- 2001 Praemium Imperiale
- 2003 Jerusalem Prize
Agnes Barley (from 2002)
4, including Rebecca Miller
- Joan Copeland (sister)
- Daniel Day-Lewis (son-in-law)
Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. During this time, he received a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and married Marilyn Monroe. In 1980, he received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates.[1][2] He received the Praemium Imperiale prize in 2001, the Prince of Asturias Award in 2002, and the Jerusalem Prize in 2003, and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in 1999.[3]
Early life and education[edit]
Miller was born in Harlem, in the New York City borough of Manhattan, the second of three children of Augusta (Barnett) and Isidore Miller. He was born into a Jewish family of Polish-Jewish descent.[4][5][6][7][8][9][10] His father was born in Radomyśl Wielki, Galicia (then part of Austria-Hungary, now Poland), and his mother was a native of New York whose parents also arrived from that town.[11] Isidore owned a women's clothing manufacturing business employing 400 people. He became a well respected man in the community.[12] The family, including Miller's younger sister Joan Copeland, lived on West[13] 110th Street in Manhattan, owned a summer house in Far Rockaway, Queens, and employed a chauffeur.[14] In the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the family lost almost everything and moved to Gravesend, Brooklyn.[15] (One source says they moved to Midwood.)[16] As a teenager, Miller delivered bread every morning before school to help the family.[14] Miller later published an account of his early years under the title "A Boy Grew in Brooklyn". After graduating in 1932 from Abraham Lincoln High School, he worked at several menial jobs to pay for his college tuition at the University of Michigan.[15][17] After graduation (c. 1936), he worked as a psychiatric aide and copywriter before accepting faculty posts at New York University and University of New Hampshire.
On May 1, 1935, he joined the League of American Writers (1935–1943), whose members included Alexander Trachtenberg of International Publishers, Franklin Folsom, Louis Untermeyer, I. F. Stone, Myra Page, Millen Brand, Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. (Members were largely either Communist Party members or fellow travelers.)[18]
At the University of Michigan, Miller first majored in journalism and wrote for the student newspaper, The Michigan Daily, and the satirical Gargoyle Humor Magazine. It was during this time that he wrote his first play, No Villain.[19] He switched his major to English, and subsequently won the Avery Hopwood Award for No Villain. The award led him to consider that he could have a career as a playwright. He enrolled in a playwriting seminar with the influential Professor Kenneth Rowe,[20] who emphasized how a play was built to achieve its intended effect, or what Miller called "the dynamics of play construction".[21] Rowe gave Miller realistic feedback and much-needed encouragement, and became a lifelong friend.[22] Miller retained strong ties to his alma mater through the rest of his life, establishing the university's Arthur Miller Award in 1985 and the Arthur Miller Award for Dramatic Writing in 1999, and lending his name to the Arthur Miller Theatre in 2000.[23] In 1937, Miller wrote Honors at Dawn, which also received the Avery Hopwood Award.[19]
After his graduation in 1938, he joined the Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal agency established to provide jobs in the theater. He chose the theater project despite the more lucrative offer to work as a scriptwriter for 20th Century Fox.[19] However, Congress, worried about possible Communist infiltration, closed the project in 1939.[15] Miller began working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard while continuing to write radio plays, some of which were broadcast on CBS.[15][19]
Career[edit]
1940–1949: Early career[edit]
In 1940, Miller married Mary Grace Slattery.[24] The couple had two children, Jane (born September 7, 1944) and Robert (May 31, 1947 – March 6, 2022).[25] Miller was exempted from military service during World War II because of a high school football injury to his left kneecap.[15] In 1944 Miller's first play was produced: The Man Who Had All the Luck won the Theatre Guild's National Award.[26] The play closed after four performances with disastrous reviews.[27]
In 1947, Miller's play All My Sons, the writing of which had commenced in 1941, was a success on Broadway (earning him his first Tony Award, for Best Author) and his reputation as a playwright was established.[28] Years later, in a 1994 interview with Ron Rifkin, Miller said that most contemporary critics regarded All My Sons as "a very depressing play in a time of great optimism" and that positive reviews from Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times had saved it from failure.[29]
In 1948, Miller built a small studio in Roxbury, Connecticut. There, in less than a day, he wrote Act I of Death of a Salesman. Within six weeks, he completed the rest of the play,[19] one of the classics of world theater.[15][30] Death of a Salesman premiered on Broadway on February 10, 1949, at the Morosco Theatre, directed by Elia Kazan, and starring Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman, Mildred Dunnock as Linda, Arthur Kennedy as Biff, and Cameron Mitchell as Happy. The play was commercially successful and critically acclaimed, winning a Tony Award for Best Author, the New York Drama Circle Critics' Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was the first play to win all three of these major awards. The play was performed 742 times.[15]
In 1949, Miller exchanged letters with Eugene O'Neill regarding Miller's production of All My Sons. O'Neill had sent Miller a congratulatory telegram; in response, he wrote a letter that consisted of a few paragraphs detailing his gratitude for the telegram, apologizing for not responding earlier, and inviting Eugene to the opening of Death of a Salesman. O'Neill replied, accepting the apology, but declining the invitation, explaining that his Parkinson's disease made it difficult to travel. He ended the letter with an invitation to Boston, a trip that never occurred.[31]
1950–1963: Critical years and HUAC controversy[edit]
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 revised A View from the Bridge as a two-act prose drama, which Peter Brook directed in London.[32] A French-Italian co-production Vu du pont, based on the play, was released in 1962.
In 1952, Elia Kazan appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Kazan named eight members of the Group Theatre, including Clifford Odets, Paula Strasberg, Lillian Hellman, J. Edward Bromberg, and John Garfield,[33] who in recent years had been fellow members of the Communist Party.[34] Miller and Kazan were close friends throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, but after Kazan's testimony to the HUAC, the pair's friendship ended.[34] After speaking with Kazan about his testimony, Miller traveled to Salem, Massachusetts, to research the witch trials of 1692.[24] He and Kazan did not speak to each other for the next ten years. Kazan later defended his own actions through his film On the Waterfront, in which a dockworker heroically testifies against a corrupt union boss.[35] Miller would retaliate against Kazan's work by writing A View from the Bridge, a play where a longshoreman outs his co-workers motivated only by jealousy and greed. He sent a copy of the initial script to Kazan and when the director asked in jest to direct the movie, Miller replied "I only sent you the script to let you know what I think of Stool-Pigeons."
In The Crucible, Miller likened the situation with the House Un-American Activities Committee to the witch hunt in Salem in 1692.[36][37][38] The play opened at the Martin Beck Theatre on Broadway on January 22, 1953. Though widely considered only somewhat successful at the time of its release, today The Crucible is Miller's most frequently produced work throughout the world.[24] It was adapted into an opera by Robert Ward in 1961.
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