Arthur Miller

**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). He wrote several screenplays, including *The Misfits* (1961). The drama *Death of a Salesman* is considered one of the best American plays of the 20th century.

### Relatives

**Parents:** Augusta Miller, and Isidore Miller
**Ex-wives:** Mary Slattery, and Marilyn Monroe
**Wife:** Inge Morath
**Parents-in-law:** Mathilde Wiesler and Edgar Morath,
**Partner:** Agnes Barley (from 2002)
**Sister:** Joan Copeland
**Children:** Jane Miller, Rebecca Miller, Daniel Miller, and Robert A Miller
**Sons-in-law:** Daniel Day-Lewis, and Tom Doyle
**Grandsons:** Gabriel-Kane Day-Lewis, Ronan Day-Lewis, and Cashel Blake Day-Lewis,
**Brother-in-law:** George J. Kupchik
**Nephew:** Eric Kupchik

### Occupation

Playwright, essayist,
screenwriter

## Physical description

### Eye color

Blue

Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. During this time, he received a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and married Marilyn Monroe. In 1980, he received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. He received the Praemium Imperiale prize in 2001, the Prince of Asturias Award in 2002, and the Jerusalem Prize in 2003, and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in 1999.

## Early life and education

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 born into a Jewish family of Polish-Jewish descent. His father was born in Radomyśl Wielki, Galicia (then part of Austria-Hungary, now Poland), and his mother was a native of New York whose parents also arrived from that town. Isidore owned a women's clothing manufacturing business employing 400 people. He became a well respected man in the community. The family, including Miller's younger sister Joan Copeland, lived on South 110th Street in Manhattan, owned a summer house in Far Rockaway, Queens, and employed a chauffeur. In the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the family lost almost everything and moved to Gravesend, Brooklyn. (One source says they moved to Midwood.) As a teenager, Miller delivered bread every morning before school to help the family. Miller later published an account of his early years under the title "A Boy Grew in Brooklyn". After graduating in 1932 from Abraham Lincoln High School, he worked at several menial jobs to pay for his college tuition at the University of Michigan. After graduation (c. 1936), he worked as a psychiatric aide and copywriter before accepting faculty posts at New York University and University of New Hampshire.

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, I. F. Stone, Myra Page, Millen Brand, Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. (Members were largely either Communist Party members or fellow travelers.)

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*. He switched his major to English, and subsequently won the Avery Hopwood Award for *No Villain.* The award led him to consider that he could have a career as a playwright. He enrolled in a playwriting seminar with the influential Professor Kenneth Rowe, who emphasized how a play was built to achieve its intended effect, or what Miller called "the dynamics of play construction". Rowe gave Miller realistic feedback and much-needed encouragement, and became a lifelong friend. Miller retained strong ties to his alma mater through the rest of his life, establishing the university's Arthur Miller Award in 1985 and the Arthur Miller Award for Dramatic Writing in 1999, and lending his name to the Arthur Miller Theatre in 2000. In 1937, Miller wrote *Honors at Dawn,* which also received the Avery Hopwood Award. After his graduation in 1938, he joined the Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal agency established to provide jobs in the theater. He chose the theater project despite the more lucrative offer to work as a scriptwriter for 20th Century Fox. However, Congress, worried about possible Communist infiltration, closed the project in 1939. Miller began working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard while continuing to write radio plays, some of which were broadcast on CBS.

## Career

### 1940–1949: 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 6, 2022). Miller was exempted from military service during World War II because of a high school football injury to his left kneecap. In 1944 Miller's first play was produced: *The Man Who Had All the Luck* won the Theatre Guild's National Award. The play closed after four performances with disastrous reviews.

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*. Within six weeks, he completed the rest of the play, one of the classics of world theater. *Death of a Salesman* premiered on Broadway on February 10, 1949, at the Morosco Theatre, directed by Elia Kazan, and starring Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman, Mildred Dunnock as Linda, Arthur Kennedy as Biff, and Cameron Mitchell as Happy. The play was commercially successful and critically acclaimed, winning a Tony Award for Best Author, the New York Drama Circle Critics' Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was the first play to win all three of these major awards. The play was performed 742 times.

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*. O'Neill replied, accepting the apology, but declining the invitation, explaining that his Parkinson's disease made it difficult to travel. He ended the letter with an invitation to Boston, a trip that never occurred.

### 1950–1963: Critical years and HUAC controversy

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. A French-Italian co-production *Vu du pont*, based on the play, was released in 1962.

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. Huston, who had also directed her in her first major role in *The Asphalt Jungle* in 1950, and who had seen her rise to stardom, put the blame for her death on her doctors as opposed to the stresses of being a star: "The girl was an addict of sleeping pills and she was made so by the God-damn doctors. It had nothing to do with the Hollywood set-up."

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, J. Edward Bromberg, and John Garfield, who in recent years had been fellow members of the Communist Party. Miller and Kazan were close friends throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, but after Kazan's testimony to the HUAC, the pair's friendship ended. After speaking with Kazan about his testimony, Miller traveled to Salem, Massachusetts, to research the witch trials of 1692. He and Kazan did not speak to each other for the next ten years. Kazan later defended his own actions through his film *On the Waterfront*, in which a dockworker heroically testifies against a corrupt union boss. Miller would retaliate against Kazan's work by writing *A View from the Bridge*, a play where a longshoreman outs his co-workers motivated only by jealousy and greed. He sent a copy of the initial script to Kazan and when the director asked in jest to direct the movie, Miller replied "I only sent you the script to let you know what I think of Stool-Pigeons."

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. Though widely considered only somewhat successful at the time of its release, today *The Crucible* is Miller's most frequently produced work throughout the world. It was adapted into an opera by Robert Ward in 1961.

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. Before appearing, Miller asked the committee not to ask him to name names, to which the chairman, Francis E. Walter (D-PA) agreed. 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 demanded the names of friends and colleagues who had participated in similar activities. Miller refused to comply, 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 sentenced to a fine and a prison sentence, blacklisted, and disallowed a US passport. In August 1958, his conviction was overturned by the court of appeals, which ruled that Miller had been misled by the chairman of the HUAC.

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. Barthel's coverage of the highly publicized Barbara Gibbons murder case helped raise bail for Gibbons' son Peter Reilly, who had been convicted of his mother's murder based on what many felt was a coerced confession and little other evidence. Barthel documented the case in her book *A Death in Canaan*, which was made as a television film of the same name and broadcast in 1978. *City Confidential*, an A&E Network series, produced an episode about the murder, postulating that part of the reason Miller took such an active interest (including supporting Reilly's defense and using his own celebrity to bring attention to Reilly's plight) was because he had felt similarly persecuted in his run-ins with the HUAC. He sympathized with Reilly, whom he firmly believed to be innocent and to have been railroaded by the Connecticut State Police and the Attorney General who had initially prosecuted the case.

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. Monroe was taking drugs to help her sleep and more drugs to help her wake up, which caused her to arrive on the set late and then have trouble remembering her lines. Huston was unaware that Miller and Monroe were having problems in their private life. He recalled later, "I was impertinent enough to say to Arthur that to allow her to take drugs of any kind was criminal and utterly irresponsible. Shortly after that I realized that she wouldn't listen to Arthur at all; he had no say over her actions."

### 1964–2004: 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. It 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, Maggie, on stage. Robert Brustein, in a review in the *New Republic*, called *After the Fall* "a three and one half hour breach of taste, a confessional autobiography of embarrassing explicitness ... There is a misogynistic strain in the play which the author does not seem to recognize. ... He has created a shameless piece of tabloid gossip, an act of exhibitionism which makes us all voyeurs ... a wretched piece of dramatic writing." That year, Miller produced *Incident at Vichy*. In 1965, he was elected the first American president of PEN International, a position which he held for four years. A year later, he organized the 1966 PEN congress in New York City. He also wrote the penetrating family drama *The Price*, produced in 1968. It was his most successful play since *Death of a Salesman*.

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. Throughout the 1970s, he 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.

Miller was an unusually articulate commentator on his own work. In 1978, he published a collection of his *Theater Essays*, edited by Robert A. Martin and with a foreword by Miller. Highlights of the collection included Miller's introduction to his *Collected Plays*, his reflections on the theory of tragedy, comments on the McCarthy Era, and pieces arguing for a publicly supported theater. Reviewing this collection in the *Chicago Tribune,* Studs Terkel remarked, "In reading [the *Theater Essays*] ... you are exhilaratingly aware of a social critic, as well as a playwright, who knows what he's talking about."

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. Around the same time, *Death of a Salesman* was adapted into a television film starring Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman. The film was broadcast on CBS, and garnered an audience viewership of 25 million. In late 1987, Miller's autobiographical work, *Timebends*, was published. Before it was published, it was well known that Miller would not talk about Monroe in interviews; however, in the book, he wrote extensively in detail about his experiences with Monroe.

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 adaptation of *The Crucible* starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Scofield, Bruce Davison and Winona Ryder was released. Miller spent much of 1996 working on the screenplay.

*Mr. Peters' Connections* was staged Off-Broadway in 1998, and *Death of a Salesman* was revived on Broadway in 1999 to celebrate its 50th anniversary. The 1999 revival ran for 274 performances at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre, starring Brian Dennehy as Willy Loman. Once again, it was a large critical success, winning a Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.

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. In 2001, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected him for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. His lecture, "On Politics and the Art of Acting", analyzed political events (including the U.S. presidential election of 2000) in terms of the "arts of performance". It drew attacks from some conservatives such as Jay Nordlinger, who called it "a disgrace"; and George Will, who argued that Miller was not a legitimate "scholar".

In October 1999, Miller received The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, 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 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. On May 1, 2002, he received Spain's Principe de Asturias Prize for Literature as "the undisputed master of modern drama". Later that year, Ingeborg Morath died of lymphatic cancer at the age of 78. The following year, Miller won the Jerusalem Prize.

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. Miller's final play, *Finishing the Picture*, opened at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago, in the fall of 2004, with one character said to be based on Barley. It was reportedly based on his experience during the filming of *The Misfits*, though Miller insisted the play was a work of fiction with independent characters that were no more than composite shadows of history.

## References

1. ↑ "Website of St. Louis Literary Award". Archived from the original on August 23, 2016. Retrieved July 25, 2016.
2. ↑ Saint Louis University Library Associates. "Recipients of the Saint Louis Literary Award". Archived from the original on July 31, 2016. Retrieved July 25, 2016.
3. ↑ Associated Press, "Citing Arts' Power, Arthur Miller Accepts International Prize". The Los Angeles Times, 4 September 2002
4. ↑ Ratcliffe, Michael (February 12, 2005). "**Arthur Miller**". *The Guardian*. Retrieved May 8, 2018.
5. ↑ Arthur Miller, *Timebends: A Life*, A&C Black, 2012. p. 539.
6. ↑ BBC TV Interview; Miller and Yentob; 'Finishing the Picture,' 2004