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). +more
Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, '50s and early '60s. During this time, he received a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and married Marilyn Monroe. +more
Biography
Early life
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 Jewish and of Polish-Jewish descent. +more
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, +more
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. +more
Early career
In 1940, Miller married Mary Grace Slattery. The couple had two children, Jane (born September 7, 1944) and Robert (May 31, 1947 - March 6th, 2022). +more
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. 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.
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. +more
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. +more
Critical years
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. +more
Marriages and family
In June 1956, Miller left his first wife, Mary Slattery, whom he married in 1940, and wed film star Marilyn Monroe. They met in 1951, had a brief affair, and remained in contact. +more
Monroe began to reconsider her career and the fact that trying to manage it made her feel helpless. She admitted to Miller, "I hate Hollywood. +more
Monroe converted to Judaism to "express her loyalty and get close to both Miller and his parents", writes biographer Jeffrey Meyers. She told her close friend, Susan Strasberg: "I can identify with the Jews. +more
Away from Hollywood and the culture of celebrity, Monroe's life became more normal; she began cooking, keeping house and giving Miller more attention and affection than he had been used to.
Later that year, Miller was subpoenaed by the HUAC, and Monroe accompanied him. In her personal notes, she wrote about her worries during this period: [wiki_quote=9e565532]
Miller began work on writing the screenplay for The Misfits in 1960, directed by John Huston and starring Monroe. It was during the filming that Miller's and Monroe's relationship hit difficulties, and he later said that the filming was one of the lowest points in his life. +more
Shortly before the film's premiere in 1961, Miller and Monroe divorced after five years of marriage. Nineteen months later, on August 5, 1962, Monroe died of a likely drug overdose. +more
In February 1962, Miller married photographer Inge Morath, who had worked as a photographer documenting the production of The Misfits. The first of their two children, Rebecca, was born September 15, 1962. +more
HUAC controversy and The Crucible
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, +more
In The Crucible, Miller likened the situation with the House Un-American Activities Committee to the witch hunt in Salem in 1692. The play opened at the Martin Beck Theatre on Broadway on January 22, 1953. +more
The HUAC took an interest in Miller himself not long after The Crucible opened, engineering the US State Department's denying him a passport to attend the play's London opening in 1954. When Miller applied in 1956 for a routine renewal of his passport, the House Un-American Activities Committee used this opportunity to subpoena him to appear before the committee. +more
Miller's experience with the HUAC affected him throughout his life. In the late 1970s, he joined other celebrities (including William Styron and Mike Nichols) who were brought together by the journalist Joan Barthel. +more
Later career
In 1964, After the Fall was produced, and is said to be a deeply personal view of Miller's experiences during his marriage to Monroe. It reunited Miller with his former friend Kazan; they collaborated on the script and direction. +more
In 1968, Miller attended the Democratic National Convention as a delegate for Eugene McCarthy. In 1969, Miller's works were banned in the Soviet Union after he campaigned for the freedom of dissident writers. +more
Miller was an unusually articulate commentator on his own work. In 1978 he published a collection of his Theater Essays, edited by Robert A. +more
In 1983, Miller traveled to China to produce and direct Death of a Salesman at the People's Art Theatre in Beijing. It was a success in China and in 1984, Salesman in Beijing, a book about Miller's experiences in Beijing, was published. +more
During the early-mid 1990s, Miller wrote three new plays: The Ride Down Mt. +more
In 1993, Miller received the National Medal of Arts. He was honored with the PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award for a Master American Dramatist in 1998. +more
Organization of American Historians
, May 2001. such as Jay Nordlinger, who called it "a disgrace"; and George Will, who argued that Miller was not a legitimate "scholar".
In 1999, Miller received The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, one of the richest prizes in the arts, given annually to "a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind's enjoyment and understanding of life. " In 2001, he received the National Book Foundation's [url=https://web. +more
In December 2004, 89-year-old Miller announced that he had been in love with 34-year-old minimalist painter Agnes Barley and had been living with her at his Connecticut farm since 2002, and that they intended to marry. Within hours of her father's death, Rebecca Miller ordered Barley to vacate the premises because she had consistently been opposed to the relationship. +more
Death
Miller died on the evening of February 10, 2005 (the 56th anniversary of the Broadway debut of Death of a Salesman) at age 89 of bladder cancer and heart failure, at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. He had been in hospice care at his sister's apartment in New York since his release from hospital the previous month. +more
Legacy
Miller's writing career spanned over seven decades, and at the time of his death, he was considered one of the 20th century's greatest dramatists. After his death, many respected actors, directors, and producers paid tribute to him, some calling him the last great practitioner of the American stage, and Broadway theatres darkened their lights in a show of respect. +more
Mller's letters, notes, drafts and other papers are housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
Miller is also a member of the American Theater Hall of Fame. He was inducted in 1979.
In 1993, he received the Four Freedoms Award for Freedom of Speech.
In 2017, his daughter, Rebecca Miller, a writer and filmmaker, completed a documentary about her father's life, Arthur Miller: Writer.
Minor planet 3769 Arthurmiller is named after him.
Foundation
The Arthur Miller Foundation was founded to honor the legacy of Miller and his New York City Public School education. Its mission is "Promoting increased access and equity to theater arts education in our schools and increasing the number of students receiving theater arts education as an integral part of their academic curriculum. +more
The foundation celebrated Miller's 100th birthday with a one-night performance of his seminal works in November 2015.
The Arthur Miller Foundation currently supports a pilot program in theater and film at the public school Quest to Learn, in partnership with the Institute of Play. The model is being used as an in-school elective theater class and lab. +more
Archive
Miller donated thirteen boxes of his earliest manuscripts to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin in 1961 and 1962. This collection included the original handwritten notebooks and early typed drafts for Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, All My Sons, and other works. +more
Literary and public criticism
Christopher Bigsby wrote Arthur Miller: The Definitive Biography based on boxes of papers Miller made available to him before his death in 2005. The book was published in November 2008, and is reported to reveal unpublished works in which Miller "bitterly attack[ed] the injustices of American racism long before it was taken up by the civil rights movement".
In his book Trinity of Passion, author Alan M. +more
In 1999 the writer Christopher Hitchens attacked Miller for comparing the Monica Lewinsky investigation to the Salem witch hunt. Miller had asserted a parallel between the examination of physical evidence on Lewinsky's dress and the examinations of women's bodies for signs of the "Devil's Marks" in Salem. +more
Works
Stage plays
No Villain (1936) * They Too Arise (1937, based on No Villain) * Honors at Dawn (1938, based on They Too Arise) * The Grass Still Grows (1938, based on They Too Arise) * The Great Disobedience (1938) * Listen My Children (1939, with Norman Rosten) * The Golden Years (1940) * The Half-Bridge (1943) * The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944) * All My Sons (1947) * Death of a Salesman (1949) * An Enemy of the People (1950, based on Henrik Ibsen's play An Enemy of the People) * The Crucible (1953) * A View from the Bridge (1955) * A Memory of Two Mondays (1955) * After the Fall (1964) * Incident at Vichy (1964) * The Price (1968) * The Reason Why (1970) * Fame (one-act, 1970; revised for television 1978) * The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972) * Up from Paradise (1974) * The Archbishop's Ceiling (1977) * The American Clock (1980) * Playing for Time (television play, 1980) * Elegy for a Lady (short play, 1982, first part of Two Way Mirror) * Some Kind of Love Story (short play, 1982, second part of Two Way Mirror) * I Think About You a Great Deal (1986) * Playing for Time (stage version, 1985) * I Can't Remember Anything (1987, collected in Danger: Memory!) * Clara (1987, collected in Danger: Memory!) * The Ride Down Mt. +more
Radio plays
The Pussycat and the Expert Plumber Who Was a Man (1941) * Joel Chandler Harris (1941) * The Battle of the Ovens (1942) * Thunder from the Mountains (1942) * I Was Married in Bataan (1942) * That They May Win (1943) * Listen for the Sound of Wings (1943) * Bernardine (1944) * I Love You (1944) * Grandpa and the Statue (1944) * The Philippines Never Surrendered (1944) * The Guardsman (1944, based on Ferenc Molnár's play) * The Story of Gus (1947)
Screenplays
The Hook (1947) * All My Sons (1948) * Let's Make Love (1960) * The Misfits (1961) * Death of a Salesman (1985) * Everybody Wins (1990) * The Crucible (1996)
Assorted fiction
Focus (novel, 1945) * "The Misfits" (short story, published in Esquire, October 1957) * I Don't Need You Anymore (short stories, 1967) * Homely Girl: A Life (short story, 1992, published in UK as "Plain Girl: A Life" 1995) * "The Performance" (short story) * Presence: Stories (2007) (short stories include The Bare Manuscript, Beavers, The Performance, and Bulldog)
Non-fiction
Situation Normal (1944) is based on his experiences researching the war correspondence of Ernie Pyle. * In Russia (1969), the first of three books created with his photographer wife Inge Morath, offers Miller's impressions of Russia and Russian society. +more
Collections
Abbotson, Susan C. W. +more
University of Michigan alumni
Kennedy Center honorees
Laurence Olivier Award winners
Primetime Emmy Award winners
Pulitzer Prize for Drama winners
Recipients of the Praemium Imperiale
Tony Award winners
20th-century American dramatists and playwrights
20th-century American non-fiction writers
20th-century American novelists
20th-century American screenwriters
20th-century American short story writers
20th-century essayists
21st-century American dramatists and playwrights
21st-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century American screenwriters
21st-century American short story writers
21st-century essayists
Abraham Lincoln High School (Brooklyn) alumni
American agnostics
American anti-capitalists
American autobiographers
20th-century American Jews
American male dramatists and playwrights
American male essayists
American male non-fiction writers
American male novelists
American male screenwriters
American male short story writers
American memoirists
American people of Polish-Jewish descent
American radio writers
Analysands of Rudolph Lowenstein
Cultural critics
Deaths from bladder cancer
Deaths from cancer in Connecticut
Free speech activists
Hopwood Award winners
Jerusalem Prize recipients
Jewish agnostics
Jewish American dramatists and playwrights
Jewish novelists
The Michigan Daily alumni
PEN International
People from Brooklyn Heights
People from Gravesend, Brooklyn
People from Midwood, Brooklyn
People from Roxbury, Connecticut
Postmodern writers
Recipients of the Four Freedoms Award
American social commentators
Social critics
Special Tony Award recipients
Writers about activism and social change
Writers about communism
Writers from Brooklyn
Writers from Connecticut
21st-century American Jews
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