Arthur Miller Biography and List of Works

American playwright who combined in his works social awareness with deep insights into personal weaknesses of his characters. Miller is best known for the play DEATH OF A SALESMAN (1949), or on the other hand, for his marriage to the actress Marilyn Monroe. Miller's plays continued the realistic tradition that began in the United States in the period between the two world wars.

"Don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person."
(from Death of a Salesman)

Arthur Miller was born in New York. His father was a ladies-wear manufacturer and shopkeeper who was ruined in the depression. The sudden change in fortune had a strong influence on Miller - often his plays depict how families are destroyed by false values. 'It got so bad that one night, after dinner, my grandfather put down his paper-he who had been a Republican all his life and believed, if you pressed him hard enough, that what America needed was a king like they had in Austria-my grandfather turned to me with his great bald head and the bags under his eyes like yon Hindenburg's, and said, "You know what you ought to do? You ought to go to Russia."' (from Echoes Down the Corridor, 2000) After graduating from a high school in 1932, Miller worked two years to earn money for college. Having read Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov Miller decided to become a writer. He entered the University of Michigan in 1934, where he won awards for playwriting - one of the other awarded playwrights was Tennessee Williams.

After graduating in English in 1938, Miller returned to New York. There he joined the Federal Theatre Project, and wrote scripts for radio programs. Because of a football injury, he was exempt from draft. In 1940 Miller married a Catholic girl, Mary Slattery, with whom he had two children. Miller's first play to appear on Broadway was THE MAN WHO HAD ALL THE LUCK (1944). It closed after four performances. Three years later he produced ALL MY SONS, about a factory owner who sells faulty aircraft parts during World War II. It won the New York Drama Critics Circle award.

Miller's DEATH OF A SALESMAN (1949) brought him international fame, and become one of the major achievements of modern American theatre. It relates the tragic story of a salesman named Willy Loman, whose past and present are mingled in expressionistic scenes. Loman is not the great success that he claims to be to his family and friends. He is eventually fired and he begins to hallucinate about significant events from his past. Deciding that he is worth more dead than alive, he kills himself in his car - hoping that the insurance money will support his family and his son Biff could get a new start in his life. Critics have disagreed whether his suicide is an act of cowardice or a last sacrifice on the altar of the American dream.

WILLY: I'm not interested in stories about the past or any crap of that kind because the woods are burning, boys, you understand? There's a big blaze going on all around. I was fired today.
BIFF (shocked): How could you be?
WILLY: I was fired, and I'm looking for a little good news to tell your mother, because the woman has waited and the woman has suffered. The gist of it is that I haven't got a story left in my head, Biff. So don't give me a lecture about facts and aspects. I am not interested. Now what've you got so say to me?
(from Death of a Salesman)

In the 1950s Miller was subjected to scrutiny by a committee of the United States Congress investigating Communist influence in the arts. He was denied a passport to attend the Brussels premiere of his play THE CRUCIBLE (1953). It used the seventeenth-century Salem witch hunts as an allegory for the McCarthy era - in Salem one could be hanged because of ''the inflamed human imagination, the poetry of suggestion.'' The Crucible became one of Miller's most-produced plays, although its first Broadway production flopped. Two short plays under the collective title A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE were successfully produced in 1955. The drama was about incestuous love, jealousy and betrayal.

"You know, sometimes God mixes up the people. We all love somebody, the wife, the kids - every man's got somebody he loves, heh? Bus sometimes... there's too much. You know? There's too much, and it goes where it mustn't. A man works hard, he brings up a child, sometimes it's a niece, sometimes even a daughter, and he never realizes it, but through the years - there is too much love for the daughter, there is too much love for the niece."
(from A View from the Bridge)

In 1956 Miller was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Miller admitted that he had attended certain meetings, but denied that he was a Communist. Refusing to name others, who had associated with leftist or suspected Communist groups, Miller was cited for contempt of Congress, but the ruling was reversed by the courts in 1958.

Miller married the motion-picture actress Marilyn Monroe in 1956; they divorced in 1961. In the late 1950s Miller wrote nothing for the theatre. His screenplay MISFITS was written with a role for his wife. The film was directed by John Huston, starring Mongomery Clift, Clark Gable, and Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn was always late getting to the set and used drugs heavily. The marriage was already breaking up.

"One evening I was about to drive away from the location - miles out in the desert - when I saw Arthur standing alone. Marilyn and her friends hadn't offered him a ride back; they'd just left him. If I hadn't happened to see him, he would have been stranded out there. My sympathies were more and more with him."
(John Huston in An Open Book, 1980)

Miller returned to stage in 1964 after a nine-year absence with the play AFTER THE FALL, a strongly autobiographical work. Many critics consider that Maggie, the self-destructive central character in the play, was modelled on Monroe, though Miller denied this. A year after his divorce Miller married the Swedish photographer Inge Morath, with whom he co-operated on two books about China and Russia.

With Tennessee Williams, Miller became one of the best-known American playwrights after WW II. Several of his works have been filmed by such directors as John Huston, Sidney Lumet and Karel Reiz. Miller has been politically active throughout his life. He was a delegate at the 1968 Democratic Convention and president of International PEN from 1965 to 1969. In the 1990s Miller wrote such plays as THE RIDE DOWN MOUNT MORGAN (prod. 1991) and THE LAST YANKEE (prod. 1993), but in an interview he stated that "It happens to be a very bad historical moment for playwriting, because the theatre is getting more and more difficult to find actors for, since television pays so much and the movies even more than that. If you're young, you'll probably be writing about young people, and that's easier -- you can find young actors -- but you can't readily find mature actors." ('We're Probably in an Art That Is -- Not Dying' , The New York Times, January 17, 1993)

The Crucible (1953) - drama about the Salem witch trials of 1692, based on court records and historical personages. The daughter of Salem's minister falls mysteriously ill. Rumours of witchcraft spread throughout the town. The minister accuses Abigail Williams of wrongdoing, but she transforms the accusation into a plea for help: her soul has been bewitched. Young girls, led by Abigail, make accusations of witchcraft against townspeople whom they do not like. Abigail accuses Elizabeth Proctor, the wife of an upstanding farmer, whom she had once seduced. Elizabeth's husband John Proctor reveals his past lechery. Elizabeth, unaware, fails to confirm his testimony. To protect him she testifies falsely that her husband has not been intimate with Abigail. Proctor is accused of witchcraft and condemned to death.

For further reading: Approaches to Teaching Miller's Death of a Salesman, ed. by Matthew C. Roudane (1995); Arthur Miller and His Plays by P. Singh (1990); Arthur Miller by B. Glassman (1990); File on Miller, ed. by C.W.E. Bigsby (1988); Arthur Miller, ed. by H. Bloom (1987); Arthur Miller by J. Schlueter and J.K. Flanagan (1987); Convesations with Arthur Miller, M.C. Roudané (1987); Arthur Miller: Social Drama as Tragedy by S.K. Bhatia (1985); Twentieth Century Interpretations of Death of a Salesman, ed. by H.W. Koon (1983); Arthur Miller by N. Carson (1982); Arthur Miller by L. Moss (1980); Arthur Miller by R. Hayman (1972); Arthur Miller by R. Hogan (1964); Arthur Miller, ed. by R.W. Corrigan (1962)

HONORS AT DAWN, (1936)