Background

Arthur Miller was born on October 17, 1915 in Harlem, New York City, United States; the son of Isidore and Augusta (Barnett) Miller.

Education

Miller graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1932. Six years later he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Michigan.

Career

Miller, before his professional career, worked as a radio singer, truck driver and clerk in an automobile-parts warehouse. He began writing plays as a student at the University of Michigan and worked for the student paper, the "Michigan Daily". There he wrote his first play "No Villain".

Then in 1938, Arthur joined the Federal Theater Project in order to get a job in the theater. In 1940, his first Broadway play "The Man Who Had All the Luck" was produced and exhibited in New Jersey. Also in 1947, Miller wrote a play "All My Sons", which became a Broadway success. That play established him as a well-known playwright.

In 1948, Arthur constructed a small studio in Connecticut. He started writing "Death of a Salesman" there and finished it in a few weeks. That play premiered on Broadway on February 10, 1949 at the Morosco Theatre and was performed 742 times.

Miller's play "The Crucible", 1953, was based on the witchcraft trials in Salem city in 1692-1993, a series of persecutions that he considered an echo of the McCarthyism of his day, when investigations of alleged subversive activities were widespread.

Arthur wrote a play "A View from the Bridge", 1956 which was also performed on Broadway. It was a verse-drama by Miller and it opened along with one of his other plays called "A Memory of Two Mondays".

Arthur began work on writing the screenplay for "The Misfits" in 1960, directed by John Huston and starring his second wife, Marilyn Monroe. It was released in 1961.

In 1964, his play "After the Fall" was produced and is said to be a deeply personal view of Miller's experiences during his marriage to Monroe. The play was opened on January 23, 1964 at the ANTA Theatre in Washington Square Park.

Then 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 and wrote such plays as "Fame and The Reason Why", "In The Country and Chinese Encounters", "The Creation of the World and Other Business" and its musical adaptation "Up from Paradise". In addition, in 1978, he published a collection of his "Theater Essays" on which he himself gave a commentary and the collection of his work was edited by Robert A. Martin.

In 1983, Miller traveled to China to produce and direct "Death of a Salesman" at the People's Art Theatre in Beijing. His autobiography "Timebends" was published in 1987.

During the early-mid 1990s, Arthur wrote three new plays "The Ride Down Mt. Morgan", 1991, "The Last Yankee", 1992 and "Broken Glass", 1994. Also his play "Death of a Salesman" was revived on Broadway in 1999 to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary.

Miller's final play "Finishing the Picture" opened at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in autumn 2004.

Achievements

• Arthur Miller is considered one of the greatest American playwrights of the 20th century. He was honored with the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a Master American Dramatist in 1998.
  
  In 2001, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Miller for the Jefferson Lecture, the United States federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.
  
  In 2001, Miller received the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He was also a member of the American Theater Hall of Fame.
  
  The Arthur Miller Foundation was founded to honor the legacy of Miller and his New York City Public School Education.
  
  Arthur donated thirteen boxes of his earliest manuscripts to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin in 1961 and 1962.

Works

More photos

• bok

  • In the Country 1977

• book

  • A View from the Bridge

    (Set in the 1950s on the gritty Brooklyn waterfront, A Vie...)

    1955
  • Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

    (In the inaugural volume of its collected edition of Mille...)

    2006
  • Timebends: A Life

    (The definitive memoir of Arthur Miller the famous playwri...)

    1987
  • Presence: Stories

    (Throughout his life, Arthur Miller, one of the foremost d...)

    2007
  • Incident at Vichy

    (In Incident at Vichy, Arthur Miller re-creates Dante's he...)

    1964
  • The Crucible

    (One of the true masterpieces of twentieth-century America...)

    1953
  • The Creation of the World and Other Business

    (Breathing new life into timeless biblical tales, Arthur M...)

    1972
  • Resurrection Blues

    (Arthur Miller’s penultimate play, Resurrection Blues, is ...)

    2002
  • All My Sons

    (Joe Keller and Steve Deever, partners in a machine shop d...)

    1947
  • Jane's Blanket

    (Soft and warm, Jane's blanket had always been there to co...)

    1963
  • The American Clock

    (It is the story of a single-family, Moe and Rose Baum, an...)

    1980
  • Salesman in Beijing

    (The playwright describes his experiences in China directi...)

    1984
  • After the Fall

    (After the Fall is embedded in historical events that were...)

    1964
  • The Archbishop's Ceiling

    (In an unnamed Eastern European capital, four writers gath...)

    1977
  • The Price

    (Years after an angry breakup, Victor and Walter Franz are...)

    1968
  • Mr. Peters' Connections

    (Produced in May 1998 in New York and starring Peter Falk,...)

    1998
  • A Memory of Two Mondays

    (A Memory of Two Mondays is a one-act play by Arthur Mille...)

    1955
  • Death of a Salesman

    (Willy Loman has been a salesman for 34 years. At 60, he i...)

    1949
  • The Ride Down Mt. Morgan

    (A car wreck on the slopes of Mt. Morgan puts poet and ins...)

    1991
  • Playing for Time

    (Paris, 1942. Fania Fénelon, a popular Jewish nightclub si...)

    1985
  • In Russia 1969
  • The Misfits 1957
  • Focus 1945
  • Everybody Wins 1984
  • Let's Make Love 1960
  • Broken Glass 1994
  • The Last Yankee 1993
  • I Can't Remember Anything 1987
  • Some Kind of Love Story 1982
  • Elegy For a Lady 1982

Politics

Arthur Miller supposed that every American citizen deserved the right to their own political views. Miller says he was never a member of the communist party but accepted he supported communist-front groups and refused to give names of people associated with the Communist party. He had liberal political views and believed in the evils of Blind Persecution.

In the 1940s and 1950s, because of his Jewish faith and his liberal political views, Miller was very much involved in contemporary debates that criticized the shortcomings of modern American society, particularly those dealing with inequalities in labor and race. It was also these political areas that were considered suspicious by Joseph McCarthy and his cronies, who sought to expose and erase Communism in America. Miller’s association with people and organizations targeted by McCarthy’s House Committee on Un-American Activities solidified his belief in the evils of blind persecution.

Views

Miller believed that a play should embody a delicate balance between the individual and society, between the singular personality and the polity and between the separate and collective elements of life.

Quotations: "Everything we are is at every moment alive in us."

"Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value."

"Betrayal is the only truth that sticks."

"The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always."

"The two most common elements in the world are hydrogen and stupidity."

"The very impulse to write springs from an inner chaos crying for order - for meaning."

"A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from. And by those he has walked away from that cause him remorse."

"Immortality is like trying to carve your initials in a block of ice in the middle of July."

"All organisation is and must be grounded on the idea of exclusion and prohibition just as two objects cannot occupy the same space."

Membership

Miller was a president of PEN International from 1965 to 1969.

• League of American Writers , United States

  1935 - 1943

Personality

Arthur Miller described himself as an impatient moralist.

Interests

• carpentry, farming, woodworking

Connections

In 1940, Arthur Miller married Mary Grace Slattery and they had two children, Jane and Robert. Sixteen years later he divorced with his first wife and married Marilyn Monroe. In 1961, Miller and Monroe divorced. Then in February 1962, Arthur married Inge Morath. They remained together until her death in 2002. The marriage produced a son, Daniel and a daughter, Rebecca.

In 2004, Miller came out public with his love affair with a 34-year-old painter Agnes Barley. He was 89 at the time. They intended to get married but couldn't as their relationship was opposed by his daughter.

Father:

Isidore Miller

He owned a women's clothing manufacturing business employing 400 people.

Mother:

Augusta (Barnett) Miller

ex-wife:

Marilyn Monroe

ex-wife:

Inge Morath

Ingeborg Hermine Morath (May 27, 1923 – January 30, 2002) was an Austrian-born American photographer.

Daughter:

Jane Ellen Miller

Daughter:

Rebecca Augusta Miller

Rebecca Augusta Miller, Lady Day-Lewis (born September 15, 1962) is an American independent filmmaker and novelist, known for her films Angela, Personal Velocity: Three Portraits, The Ballad of Jack and Rose, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, and Maggie's Plan, all of which she wrote and directed.

Son:

Robert A. Miller

Son:

Daniel Miller

He was born in November, 1966 with Down syndrome.

ex-wife:

Mary Grace Slattery

Sister:

Joan Copeland

Joan Maxine Copeland (née Miller; born June 1, 1922) is an American actress.

References

• Critical Companion to Arthur Miller: A Literary Reference to His Life And Work A guide to the playwright's life and work presents a brief biography; offers synopses and critical assessments of his writings; and discusses important people, places, and themes in his life.
  2007
• Student Companion to Arthur Miller
  2000
• Arthur Miller: His Life And Work The award-winning drama critic and biographer Martin Gottfried masterfully draws on his interviews, on Miller's voluminous lifelong correspondence, and on the annotated scripts and notebooks that reveal Miller's creative process in stunning detail.
  2004
• Arthur Miller Offers a comprehensive study of the twentieth-century American dramatist and novelist emphasizing his technical resources
  1980
• Arthur Miller's Life and Literature
  2000