Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller (1915-2005), American dramatist, regarded as one of the major playwrights of the 20th century.

Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in New York, the son of a coat manufacturer, who suffered financial ruin in the Great Depression. In 1938, while a student at the University of Michigan, he won awards for his comedy The Grass Still Grows. When he returned to New York, he started writing radio dramas. In 1944 his play The Man Who Had All the Luck, although not a commercial success, won him the Theatre Guild Award. His novel Focus (1945), an attack on anti-Semitism, was successful, and the New York Drama Critics' Circle chose his drama All My Sons as the best play of 1947. This study of the effect of opportunism on family relationships foreshadowed most of Miller's later work.

Miller's major achievement was Death of a Salesman (1949). It won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play of the year and is often cited as one of the finest plays by a contemporary dramatist. It tells, in almost poetic terms, the tragic story of an average man much like Miller's father. His play The Crucible (1953), although concerned with the Salem witchcraft trials, was actually aimed at the then widespread congressional investigation of subversive activities in the United States led by Senator Joseph McCarthy; the drama won the Antoinette Perry Award. Miller himself appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956. He was convicted of contempt, but later the conviction was appealed against and reversed.

His dramas also included A View from the Bridge (1955), Incident at Vichy (1964), The Price (1968), and The Archbishop's Ceiling (1977)—on the Soviet treatment of dissident writers. Among his other works were the screenplay The Misfits (1960), written for his second wife, the actress Marilyn Monroe, who also inspired his later plays After the Fall (1963) and Finishing the Picture (2004); The American Clock (1980), a series of dramatic vignettes based on Hard Times (1970), a study of the Great Depression by the American writer Studs Terkel; the satire on international politics and the media, Resurrection Blues (2002); a collection of short stories, I Don't Need You Any More (1967); and The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (1978). Miller's works are intensely concerned with the responsibility of each individual to other people, and the themes of self-knowledge and self-realization are recurrent. Simply and colloquially written, they sprang from the author's social conscience and his compassion for those who are vulnerable to and led astray by the false values imposed on them by society. His acclaimed autobiography, Timebends: a Life, was published in 1987.