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| Birth Name(s) : Arthur Miller |
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Full Arthur Miller Biography
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 and performed 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.
Arthur Miller was born to moderately affluent Jewish-American parents, Isidore and Augusta Miller, in Manhattan, New York City, in 1915. His father owned a women's clothes/coat-manufacturing business, which failed in the Wall Street Crash of 1929 after which his family moved to humbler quarters in Brooklyn.
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. 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. 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. 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.
In 1944 Miller wrote The Man Who Had All the Luck, which was produced in New York and won the Theater Guild's National Award. 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 Theater. 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 and two Tony Awards in 1947, despite Miller receiving criticism for being a Communist.Death of a Salesman cover, showing Lee J Cobb in the title role.
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. Death of a Salesman premiered on Broadway on February 10, 1949 at the Morosco Theatre, directed by Kazan, and starring Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman. The play was critically acclaimed, winning a Tony Award for best play, and a Pulitzer Prize, and ran for seven hundred and forty-two performances.
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. 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 died at his home in Roxbury of congestive heart failure on the evening of February 10, 2005 (the 56th anniversary of the Broadway debut of Death of a Salesman) at the age of 89. |
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