Arthur Miller 

(17 October, 1915 – 10 February, 2005)

Introduction to the writer - Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American
playwright and essayist in the 20th-century American theater. He was born in New York on 17th Octobar
1915. Born to a prosperous middle-class Polish-Jewish family, Arthur Miller watched his mother and father
lose most of their savings in the American financial panic of 1929.

He had not been much of a student, but after reading Dostoevsky's great novel The Brothers Karamazov he
decided that he was destined to become a writer. Miller went on to work his way through high school,
supporting himself by means of part-time employment. He had trouble getting into college but was
eventually accepted at the University of Michigan, where he began his apprenticeship as a writer and won
several student awards for his work.He graduated in 1938 with a degree in English. After college he
returned to New York and worked briefly as a radio script writer, then tried his hand at writing for the
stage commercially.

Miller was primarily influenced by one factor - he grew up during years of the Depression in America. It
was the Depression that gave him a passionate understanding of man’s insecurity in modern industrial
civilization, his deep rooted belief in social responsibility and his moral earnestness.

Before rising meteorically to the fame of a dramatist which we are familiar with Miller had led an unknown
life as a truck driver, waiter, crew man on a tanker and so on. His plays show a sympathetic understanding
of ordinary employment like the ones named above.

Miller began writing plays as an undergraduate. By 1946, his All My Sons was a success (his first major
work), and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Author. In the 1940s and early 1950s Miller wrote
other seminal works of American drama, most notably Death of a Salesman, the story of a small-time
businessman named Willy Loman, and The Crucible, an allegory of McCarthy’s communist hearings (then
raging in the United States) set in 1600s Massachusetts, during the Salem Witch Trials. Miller’s later career
was dotted with smaller success and some notable failures, including the play After the Fall (1964), which
dramatized his relationship to the deceased film actress Marilyn Monroe, and was believed by many to be
an exercise in “bad taste,” exposing as it did details of their married life. Miller married thrice. In 1940 he
married a girl named Mary Slattery who bore him a son and a daughter. Second in 1956 he married a
glamorous Hollywood actress Marilyn Monroe and lastly in 1962 to an Austrian photographer Ingeborg
Morath.

Miller lived well into his eighties, passing away on 10 February 2005, and on his death many in America and
across the English-speaking world lauded his contributions to American drama.

Among his most popular plays are 

1. All My Sons (1947)
2. Death of a Salesman (1949),
3. The Crucible (1953)
4. A View from the Bridge (1955, revised 1956)

He wrote several screenplays and was most noted for his work on The Misfits (1961). The drama Death of a
Salesman has been numbered on the short list of finest American plays in the 20th century.

Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. During this
time, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In 1980, Miller received the St. Louis Literary Award from
the Saint Louis University Library Associates. He received the Praemium Imperiale prize in 2001, Prince of
Asturias Award in 2002, and the Jerusalem Prize in 2003, as well as the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in
1999.

Introduction to the play - All My Sons, Arthur Miller's first commercially successful play, opened at the
Coronet Theatre in New York on January 29, 1947. It ran for 328 performances and garnered important
critical acclaim for the dramatist, winning the prestigious New York Drama Critics' Circle Award.

All My Sons established Miller's standing as a bright and extremely talented dramatist. The play had a good
run and won Miller his first New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. Even the least favorable commentators
recognized the playwright's great promise.

Miller followed All My Sons with three of his most critically and commercially successful plays: Death of
Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), and A View from the Bridge (1955). In these works, Miller attempted
to show that tragedy could be written about ordinary people struggling to maintain personal dignity at
critical moments in their lives.