Arthur Miller

Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright and essayist who left a major mark on 20th-century theater. His best-known works include *All My Sons* (1947), *Death of a Salesman* (1949), *The Crucible* (1953), and *A View from the Bridge* (1955). He also wrote screenplays, such as *The Misfits* (1961). *Death of a Salesman* is widely regarded as one of the finest American plays of the 1900s. Miller spent much of the late 1940s through the early 1960s in the public spotlight. During that period, he won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and was married to Marilyn Monroe. Later honors included the St. Louis Literary Award (1980), the Praemium Imperiale (2001), the Prince of Asturias Award (2002), the Jerusalem Prize (2003), and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (1999).

Miller was born in Manhattan’s Harlem neighborhood in 1915, the second of three children in a Jewish family of Polish-Jewish descent. His father, Isidore, was from Radomyśl Wielki in Galicia (then part of Austria-Hungary, now Poland), and his mother, Augusta (Barnett), was a New York native whose parents also came from that town. Isidore ran a women’s clothing business that employed 400 people and was well respected in the community. The family lived on West 110th Street, owned a summer house in Far Rockaway, Queens, and had a chauffeur. After the 1929 Wall Street crash, they lost nearly everything and moved to Gravesend, Brooklyn—though Miller later said they moved to Parkville. As a teenager, he delivered bread each morning before school to help support the family. He later wrote about these early years in a piece called “A Boy Grew in Brooklyn.”

After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1932, Miller held several low-paying jobs to fund his tuition at the University of Michigan. Following graduation, he worked as a psychiatric aide and a copywriter before taking teaching positions at New York University and the University of New Hampshire. On May 1, 1935, he joined the League of American Writers, a group that included many Communist Party members or fellow travelers. At the University of Michigan, he started as a journalism major, writing for *The Michigan Daily* and the humor magazine *Gargoyle*. There he wrote his first play, *No Villain*, and won the Avery Hopwood Award, which made him think he could become a playwright. He switched to English and took a playwriting seminar with Professor Kenneth Rowe, who taught him what Miller called “the dynamics of play construction.” Rowe became a lifelong friend and mentor. Miller stayed connected to the university, establishing the Arthur Miller Award in 1985 and the Arthur Miller Award for Dramatic Writing in 1999, and the Arthur Miller Theatre was named for him in 2000. In 1937, he wrote *Honors at Dawn*, which also won the Avery Hopwood Award. After graduating in 1938, he chose the Federal Theatre Project over a more lucrative offer from 20th Century Fox, but Congress shut the project down in 1939 over fears of Communist infiltration. He then worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard while continuing to write radio plays, some of which aired on CBS.

Miller was exempted from military service in World War II due to a high school football injury to his left kneecap. His first produced play, *The Man Who Had All the Luck* (1944), won the Theatre Guild’s National Award but closed after four performances to terrible reviews. In 1947, *All My Sons* became a Broadway success, earning Miller his first Tony Award for Best Author and establishing his reputation. Miller later said that most critics at the time found it “a very depressing play in a time of great optimism,” and that positive reviews from Brooks Atkinson of *The New York Times* saved it from failure. In 1948, he built a small studio in Roxbury, Connecticut, where he wrote Act I of *Death of a Salesman* in less than a day and finished the rest in six weeks. The play premiered on Broadway on February 10, 1949, at the Morosco Theatre, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Lee J. Cobb, Mildred Dunnock, Arthur Kennedy, and Cameron Mitchell. It was a commercial and critical hit, winning a Tony Award for Best Author, the New York Drama Circle Critics’ Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama—the first play to win all three. It ran for 742 performances. In 1949, Miller exchanged letters with Eugene O’Neill, thanking him for a congratulatory telegram about *All My Sons* and inviting him to the opening of *Death of a Salesman*.