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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 widely studied and performed worldwide••.
Miller was often in the public eye, most famously for refusing to give evidence before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and by virtue of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe from June 1956 through January 1961. At the time of his death on February 10, 2005, Miller--twice the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in Drama--was considered one of the greatest American playwrights of all time.
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Early life
Arthur Miller, the son of moderately affluent Jewish-American parents, Isdore and Augusta Miller,[The Times Arthur Miller Obituary, (London: The Times, 2005).].
Because of the effects of the Depression on his family, Miller had no money to attend a university in 1932 after he had graduated from high school.[. After securing a place at the University of Michigan, Miller worked in a number of menial jobs to pay for his tuition][. ]
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[.]
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[. However, Congress, worried about possible communist infiltration, closed the project][. Miller began working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard while continuing to write radio plays, some of which were broacast on CBS][. ]
On August 5 1940, he married his college sweetheart, Mary Slattery, the Catholic daughter of an insurance salesman [Michael Ratcliffe, Arthur Miller Obituary, (London: The Observer, 2005).]. 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
Miller was exempted from military service during World War II because of a high-school football injury to his left kneecap [.]
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Early Career
In 1944 Miller wrote The Man Who Had All the Luck, which was produced in New York, and won the Theater Guild's National Award.[Royal National Theatre: Platform Papers, 7. Arthur Milller (Battley Brothers Printers, 1995).] Despite this however, the play closed after only six performances[. 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][. ]
However, in 1947, Miller's All My Sons was produced at the Coronet Theater. 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[. All My Sons won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award ][.]
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 write Death of a Salesman[, the work for which he is best known][. ]
Death of a Salesman premiered on February 10 1949, at the Morocco Theater, New York City, directed by Kazan, and staring Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman. The play was a huge critical success, winning a Tony Award for best play[, and a Pulitzer Prize][. ]
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 Theater, who, in the 1930s, along with himself, had been members of the American Communist Party
After speaking with Kazan about his testimony[. The Crucible, a parable play in which Miller likened the situation with the House Un-American Activities Committee to the witchhunt in Salem ][. 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][. It was not long, however, before HUAC took an interest in Miller, denying him a passport to attend the Belgium opening of The Crucible in 1954][. ]
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[.]
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1956 - 1964
In June of 1956, Miller divorced Mary Slattery, his wife of sixteen years, and, later that month, June 29th, he married Marilyn Monroe [. Miller and Monroe had first met one another in 1951, when they had brief affair, and had remained in contact since then .][. ]
Taking advantage of the publicity of Miller and Monroe's marriage, HUAC subpoenaed Miller to appear before the committee shortly before the marriage. Before appearing, Miller asked the committee to not ask him to name names, to which the chairman agreed
When Miller attended the hearing, to which Monroe accompanied him, risking her own career [, he gave the committee a detailed account of his political activities. Despite what the chairman had told Miller, the committee asked him to reveal to them names of friends and colleges who partaken in similar activities ][. Miller refused to comply with the request, saying: "I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him." ][.]
Because of his refusal, in May of 1957 a judge found Miller guilty of contempt of Congress . Miller was fined $500, sentenced to thirty days in prison, blacklisted, and disallowed a US passport [. However, in 1958, his conviction was overturned by the court of appeals, ruling that Miller was misled by the chairman of HUAC ][.]
After his conviction was overturned, Miller began work on The Misfits, a film which would star his wife. Miller said that the filming of The Misfits was one of the lowest points in his life [, and shortly before the film's premier in 1961, the pair divorced ][. Miller's marriage to Monroe lasted longer than either of her two previous marriages: four years and seven months. By contrast, her marriage to Joe DiMaggio lasted only nine months. ]
A year later, Monroe died of an apparent drug overdose, and Miller married his third, and final wife, the photographer Inge Morath. Late in 1962, Miller and Morath's first child, Daniel was born, followed by their second, Rebecca in 1963.
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Later Career
It was in 1964 that Miller's next play, released seven years after his last, was produced. Titled After the Fall, the play was 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 [. 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.[.]
In the late 60's Miller dedicated a lot 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 [, which was Miller's most successful play since Death of a Salesman ,]
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 [.]
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 [ and, in 1984, Salesman in Beijing, a book about Miller's experience in Beijing, was published. In late 1987, Miller's memoirs, was published. While it was generally accepted before Timebends was published that Miller would not talk about Monroe in interviews, Miller's autobiography ][.]
During the early 1990s, Miller produced three of new plays; The Ride Down Mount Morgan in 1991, The Last Yankee in 1992, and Broken Glass in 1994.
In 1997, a film of The Crucible, staring Daniel Day Lewis and Winona Ryder opened. Miller had spent much of 1996 working on the screenplay to the film [. ]
Death of a Salesman was revived on Broadway in 1999 to celebrate it's 50th anniversary. The play, once again, was a large crittical success, winning a Tony Award for best revival of a play
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, Miller's wife of forty years, Ingeborg Morath, died. The following year Miller won the Jerusalem Prize.
Miller's final play, a drama with humor entitled Finishing the Picture opened at the Goodman Theatre (Chicago) in the fall of 2004.
Arthur Miller died of congestive heart failure on the evening of February 10, 2005. Coincidentally, Miller passed away on the 56th anniversary of the Broadway debut of Death of a Salesman. Miller was surrounded by family when he died at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, four months after the death of his older brother, Kermit Miller.
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See also
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