'Arthur Asher Miller' (
October 17,
1915 –
February 10,
2005) was an
American playwright and
essayist. He was a prominent figure in
American literature and
cinema for over 61 years, writing a wide variety of
plays, including celebrated plays such as ''
The Crucible'', ''
A View from the Bridge'', ''
All My Sons'', and ''
Death of a Salesman'', which are still studied
[1] and performed
[2] worldwide.
Miller was often in the public eye, most famously for refusing to give evidence before the
House Un-American Activities Committee, being the recipient of the
Pulitzer Prize for Drama among other awards, and for marrying
Marilyn Monroe. At the time of his death, Miller was considered one of the greatest American playwrights.
Biography
Early life
Arthur Miller was born to moderately affluent Jewish-American parents, Isidore and Augusta Miller,
[3] in
Harlem, New York City, in 1915. His father owned a women's clothes/coat-manufacturing business, which failed in the
Wall Street Crash of 1929[4] after which his family moved to humbler quarters in
Brooklyn.
[5]
Because of the effects of the
Great Depression on his family, Miller had no money for college after graduating in 1932 from
Abraham Lincoln High School (New York).
After securing a place at the
University of Michigan, he 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''.
[6] After winning the
Avery Hopwood Award for ''No Villain,'' Miller switched his major to English, where he met
Professor Kenneth Rowe, who aided Miller in his early forays into playwrighting.
[7] Miller retained strong ties to his alma mater throughout the rest of his life, establishing the university's Arthur Miller Award in 1985 and Arthur Miller Award for Dramatic Writing in 1999, and lending his name to the Arthur Miller Theatre in 2000.
[8] In 1937, Miller wrote ''
Honors at Dawn,'' which also received the Avery Hopwood Award.
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 broadcast on
CBS.
On
August 5 1940, he married his college sweetheart, Mary Slattery, the Catholic daughter of an insurance salesman.
[9] The couple had two children, Jane and Robert. Robert became a director, writer and producer whose was, among other things, producer of the 1996 movie version of ''The Crucible''
[10].
Miller was exempted from military service during
World War II because of a high-school
football injury to his left kneecap.
Early career
In 1944 Miller wrote ''The Man Who Had All the Luck,'' which was produced in New York and won the Theatre Guild's National Award.
[11] Despite this critical success, the play closed after only six performances.
The next few years were 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 television.
Things changed in 1947, when Miller's ''All My Sons'' was produced at the Coronet Theatre. 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
[12] and two
Tony Awards[13] in 1947, despite Miller receiving criticism for being a Communist.
In 1948 Miller built a small studio in
Roxbury, Connecticut, a town that was to be his long time home. There, within the space of six weeks, he wrote ''
Death of a Salesman'',
the work for which he is best known.
[14] ''Death of a Salesman'' premiered on Broadway on
February 10 1949 at the Morocco Theatre, directed by Kazan, and starring
Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman. The play was critically acclaimed, winning a Tony Award for best play,
[15] a New York Drama Critics' Award,
and a
Pulitzer Prize,
[16][17] and ran for seven hundred and forty-two performances.
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 Theatre who in recent years had been fellow members of the
Communist Party.
[18] After speaking with Kazan about his testimony
[19] Miller traveled to
Salem,
Massachusetts to research the
witch trials of 1692.
''
The Crucible'', an
allegorical play in which Miller likened the situation with the House Un-American Activities Committee to the witchhunt in Salem,
[20] opened at the Beck Theatre on
Broadway on
January 22 1953. Though widely considered unsuccessful at the time of its initial release, today ''The Crucible'' is one of Miller's most frequently produced works.
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.
HUAC took an interest in Miller himself not long after ''The Crucible'' opened, denying him a passport to attend the play's London opening in 1954.
Miller's experience with HUAC affected him throughout his life. In the late 1970s he became very interested in the highly publicized Barbara Gibbons murder case, in which Gibbons' son Peter Reilly was convicted of his mother's murder based on what many felt was a coerced confession and little other evidence. An
A&E program
City Confidential about the murder postulates that part of the reason Miller took such an active interest--including using his own celebrity to bring attention to Reilly's plight and supporting Reilly's defense--was because he had felt similarly persecuted in his run-in with the HUAC. He sympathized with Reilly, whom he firmly believed was innocent and had been railroaded by the Connecticut State Police and the Attorney General who had initially prosecuted the case.
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.
1956 - 1964
In June of 1956 Miller divorced Mary Slattery, and on
June 29, he married
Marilyn Monroe.
Miller and Monroe had first met in 1951, when they had a brief affair,
and had remained in contact since then.
Miller and Monroe at a press conference after their wedding.
Taking advantage of the publicity of Miller's marriage, HUAC
subpoenaed him to appear before the committee shortly before the nuptials. Before appearing, Miller asked the committee not to ask him to name names, to which the chairman agreed.
[21]
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. Reneging on the chairman's promise, the committee asked him to reveal to the names of friends and colleagues who had 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."
As a result a judge found Miller guilty of
contempt of Congress in May 1957. Miller was fined $500, sentenced to thirty days in prison, blacklisted, and disallowed a U.S. passport.
In 1958 his conviction was overturned by the court of appeals, which ruled that Miller had been misled by the chairman of HUAC.
After his conviction was overturned, Miller began work on ''
The Misfits'', which starred his wife. Miller said that the filming was one of the lowest points in his life,
and shortly before the film's premiere in 1961, the pair divorced.
A year later, Monroe died of an apparent drug overdose.
Miller married photographer
Inge Morath on
February 17 1962, and the first of their two children,
Rebecca, was born that September. Their son Daniel was born with
Down Syndrome in November, 1966, and was consequently institutionalized and excluded from the Miller's personal life at Miller's insistence
[22]. The couple remained together until Inge's death in 2002.
Later career
In 1964 Miller's next play was produced. ''
After the Fall'' is a deeply personal view of Miller's own experiences during his marriage to Monroe. The play reunited Miller with his former friend Kazan: they collaborated on both the script and the direction. ''
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-like character, called Maggie, on stage.
Also in the same year, Miller produced ''
Incident at Vichy''.
In 1965, Miller was elected the first American president of
International PEN, a position which he held for four years.
[23] During this period Miller wrote the penetrating family drama, ''
The Price'', produced in 1968.
It was Miller's most successful play since ''Death of a Salesman.''
[24]
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 much 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. Both his 1972 comedy ''
The Creation of the World and Other Business'' and its musical adaptation, ''
Up from Paradise'', were critical and commercial failures.
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. Around the same time, ''Death of a Salesman'' was made into a TV movie starring
Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman. Shown on CBS, it attracted 25 million viewers.
In late 1987, Miller's
autobiography, ''
Timebends'' was published. Before his autobiography was published, it was well known that that Miller would not talk about Monroe in interviews; in ''Timebends'' Miller talks about his experiences with Monroe in detail.
During the early 1990s Miller wrote three new plays, ''
The Ride Down Mt. Morgan'' (1991), ''
The Last Yankee'' (1992), and ''
Broken Glass'' (1994).
In 1996, a film of ''The Crucible'' starring
Daniel Day Lewis and
Winona Ryder opened. Miller spent much of 1996 working on the screenplay to the film.
''
Mr. Peters' Connections'' was staged
off-Broadway in 1998, and ''Death of a Salesman'' was revived on Broadway in 1999 to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. The play, once again, was a large critical success, winning a Tony Award for best revival of a play.
[26]
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, Ingeborg Morath, died of
Lymphatic cancer[27][28] at the age of 78. The following year Miller won the
Jerusalem Prize.
In December 2004, the 89-year-old Miller announced that he has been living with a 34-year-old artist
Agnes Barley at his Connecticut farm since 2002, and that they intended to marry.
Miller's final play, ''
Finishing the Picture'', opened at the
Goodman Theatre,
Chicago, in the fall of 2004. He stated that the work was based on the experience of filming ''The Misfits''.
Miller died at his home in
Roxbury of
congestive heart failure[29] on the evening of
February 10 2005 (the 56th anniversary of the Broadway debut of ''
Death of a Salesman'') at the age of 89.
Legacy
Miller's career as a writer spanned over seven decades, and at the time of his death in 2005, Miller was considered to be one of the greatest dramatists of the twentieth century, among the likes of
Harold Pinter,
Eugene O'Neill,
Luigi Pirandello,
Samuel Beckett,
Jean-Paul Sartre,
Bertolt Brecht, and
Tennessee Williams.
After his death, many respected actors, directors, and producers paid tribute to Miller,
[30] some calling him the last great practitioner of the American stage,
[31] and
Broadway theaters darkened their lights in a show of respect.
[32]
Miller's alma mater, the
University of Michigan opened the Arthur Miller Theatre in March, 2007. Per his express wish, it is the only theater in the world that bears Miller's name.
Works
★ ''No Villain'' (play, 1936)
★ ''They Too Arise'' (play, 1937, based on ''No Villain'')
★ ''Honors At Dawn'' (play, 1938, based on ''They Too Arise'')
★ ''The Grass Still Grows'' (play, 1938, based on ''They Too Arise'')
★ ''The Great Disobedience'' (play, 1938)
★ ''Listen My Children'' (play, with Norman Rosten, 1939)
★ ''The Golden Years'' (play, 1940)
★ ''The Pussycat and the Plumber Who Was a Man'' (radio play, 1941)
★ ''William Ireland’s Confession'' (radio play, 1941)
★ ''Jed Chandler Harris'' (radio play, 1941)
★ ''Captain Paul'' (radio play, 1941)
★ ''The Battle of the Ovens'' (radio play, 1942)
★ ''Thunder from the Mountains'' (radio play, 1942)
★ ''I Was Married in Bataan'' (radio play, 1942)
★ ''Toward a Farther Star'' (radio play, 1942)
★ ''The Eagle’s Nest'' (radio play, 1942)
★ ''The Four Freedoms'' (radio play, 1942)
★ ''The Half-Bridge'' (play, 1943)
★ ''That They May Win'' (radio play, 1943)
★ ''Listen for the Sound of Wings'' (radio play, 1943)
★ ''Bernardine'' (radio play, 1944)
★ ''I Love You'' (radio play, 1944)
★ ''Grandpa and the Statue'' (radio play, 1944)
★ ''The Philippines Never Surrendered'' (radio play, 1944)
★ ''
The Guardsman'' (radio play, 1944, based on
Ferenc Molnár’s play)
★ ''
Pride and Prejudice'' (radio play, 1944, based on
Jane Austen’s novel)
★ ''
The Story of G.I. Joe'' (film, 1943)
★ ''Focus'' (novel, 1945)
★ ''Three Men on a Horse'' (radio play, 1946, based on George Abbott and John C Holm play)
★ ''
All My Sons'' (play, 1947)
★ ''The Story of Gus'' (radio play, 1947)
★ ''
The Hook'' (film, 1947)
★ ''
Death of a Salesman'' (play, 1949)
★ ''
An Enemy of the People'' (play, 1950, based on
Henrik Ibsen play)
★ ''
The Crucible'' (play, 1953)
★ ''
A View from the Bridge'' (play, 1955)
★ ''
A Memory of Two Mondays'' (play, 1955)
★ ''The Misfits'' (short story, 1957)
★ ''
The Misfits'' (screenplay, 1961)
★ ''
After the Fall'' (play, 1964)
★ ''
Incident at Vichy'' (play, 1964)
★ ''I Don’t Need You Anymore'' (short stories, 1967)
★ ''
The Price'' (play, 1968)
★ ''Fame'' (television play, 1970)
★ ''
The Reason Why'' (radio play, 1970)
★ ''
The Creation of the World and Other Business'' (play, 1972)
★ ''
The Archbishop's Ceiling'' {play, 1977)
★ ''
The American Clock'' (play, 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'')
★ ''
Everybody Wins'' (screenplay, 1984)
★ ''Playing for Time'' (stage version, 1985)
★ ''I Think About You a Great Deal'' (play, 1986)
★ ''
I Can’t Remember Anything'' (play, 1987, also known as '')
★ ''
Clara'' (play, 1987, also known as ''Danger: Memory'')
★ ''
The Last Yankee'' (play, 1991)
★ ''
The Ride Down Mt. Morgan'' (play, 1991)
★ ''Homely Girl'' (short story, 1992, published UK as ''Plain Girl: A Life'' 1995)
★ ''
Broken Glass'' (play, 1994)
★ ''The Crucible'' (screenplay, 1995)
★ ''
Mr Peter’s Connections'' (play, 1998)
★ ''
Resurrection Blues'' (play, 2002)
★ ''
Finishing the Picture'' (play, 2004)
(Source: Martin Gottfried's ''Arthur Miller: A Life'', Da Capo Press 2003, except for the final entry.)
Non-fiction works
★ ''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.
★ ''In the Country'' (1977), with phototographs by Morath and text by Miller, provides insight into how Miller spent his time in Roxbury, Connecticut and profiles of his various neighbors.
★ ''Chinese Encounters'' (1979) is a travel journal with photographs by Morath. It depicts the Chinese society in the state of flux which followed the end of the
Cultural Revolution. Miller discusses the hardships of many writers, professors, and artists as they try to regain the sense of freedom and place they lost during
Mao Tse-Tung's regime.
★ ''Salesman in Beijing'' (1984) details Miller's experiences with the 1983
Beijing People's Theatre production of ''Death of a Salesman''. He describes the idiosyncrasies, misunderstandings, and insights encountered in directing a Chinese cast in a decidedly American play.
★ ''Timebends: A Life'', Methuen London (1987) ISBN 0413414809. Like ''Death of a Salesman'', the book follows the structure of memory itself, each passage linked to and triggered by the one before.
Collected Works
★ Kushner, Tony, ed. ''Arthur Miller, Collected Plays 1944-1961'' (
Library of America, 2006) ISBN 978-1-93108291-4.
★ Martin, Robert A. (ed.), "The theater essays of Arthur Miller", foreword by Arthur Miller. NY: Viking Press, 1978 ISBN 0140049037.
★ Steven R Centola, ed. ''Echoes Down the Corridor: Arthur Miller, Collected Essays 1944-2000'', Viking Penguin (US)/Methuen (UK), 2000 ISBN 0413756904
See also
★
Hollywood blacklist
★
McCarthyism
★
House Un-American Activities Committee
★
International PEN
★
Christopher Bigsby
References
Sources
★ Martin Gottfried: ''Arthur Miller, A Life'', Da Capo Press (US)/Faber and Faber (UK), 2003 ISBN 0571219462
★ Moss, Leonard. ''Arthur Miller'', Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980.
★ Martin, Robert A. (ed.), "The theater essays of Arthur Miller", foreword by Arthur Miller. NY: Viking Press, 1978.
Notes
1. Death of a Salesman studied at Emanuel
2. Death of a Salesman at Odyssey
3. Arthur Miller Files
4. Obituary: Arthur Miller
5. The Times Arthur Miller Obituary, (London: The Times, 2005)
6. A Brief Chronology of Arthur Miller's Life and Works
7. Arthur Miller Files (UM days)
8. Arthur Miller and University of Michigan
9. Michael Ratcliffe, Arthur Miller Obituary, (London: The Observer, 2005).
10. Robert A. Miller's IMDB profile
11. Royal National Theatre: Platform Papers, 7. Arthur Milller (Battley Brothers Printers, 1995).
12. New York Drama Critics' Circle Award
13. Tony Awards 1947
14. Arthur Miller dies
15. Tony Awards 1949 tonyawards.com
16. Pulitzer Prize Pulitzer.org
17. Pulitzer Prize for Drama infoplease.com
18. American Masters: Elia Kazan
19. Excerpt from ''Timebends''
20. Are you now, or were you ever?
21. BBC On This Day
22. Arthur Miller's Missing Act
23. A Visit With Castro Arthur Miller
24. Arthur Miller Files 60s70s80s
25. The Cambridge History of American Theatre: Post-World War II to the 1990s, Page:296 (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
26. Tony Awards 1999
27. Essay on Inge Morath
28. NYTimes on Morath's death
29. Boston Globe article on Miller's death
30. Tributes to Arthur Miller
31. Legacy of Arthur Miller
32. Broadway lights go out for Arthur Miller
External links
★
★
★
Arthur Miller Society
★
Arthur Miller at Monologue Search
★
''New York Times'' Obituary
★
CNN Obituary
★
BBC Obituary
★
PBS: Arthur Miller
★
Miller interview, ''Humanities'', March-April 2001
★
Miller interview, ''The Paris Review'', summer 1966
★
★
A Visit With Castro - Miller's article in ''The Nation'',
January 12 2004
★
Chronology of Arthur Miller
★
A Literary Life: Arthur Miller - Playwright and Protagonist, Steve Newman
★
Biography of Arthur Miller
★
Transcript of an extended conversation between Arthur Miller and Jonathan Miller from the BBC TV series,
The Atheism Tapes
★
Biography resources dedicated to Arthur Miller
★ Arthur Miller's papers are housed at the
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin
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