Arthur Miller

Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright, essayist, and prominent figure in twentieth-century American theatre. Among his plays are All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953) and A View from the Bridge (1955, revised 1956). He also wrote the screenplay for the film The Misfits (1961).

Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. During this time, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee; and was married to Marilyn Monroe. He received the Prince of Asturias Award in 2002 and Jerusalem Prize in 2003.

Biography

Early life

Arthur Asher Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in Harlem, in the New York City borough of Manhattan, the second of three children of Augusta (Barnett) and Isidore Miller. His father was an Austrian Jewish immigrant, and his mother was born in New York, to Austrian Jewish parents. His father owned a women's clothing manufacturing business employing 400 people. He became a wealthy and respected man in the community. The family, including his younger sister Joan, lived on West 110th Street in Manhattan and owned a summer house in Far Rockaway, Queens. They employed a chauffeur. In the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the family lost almost everything and moved to Gravesend, Brooklyn. As a teenager, Miller delivered bread every morning before school to help the family. 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, Miller first majored in journalism and worked for the student paper, the Michigan Daily. It was during this time that he wrote his first play, No Villain. Miller switched his major to English, and subsequently won the Avery Hopwood Award for No Villain. The award brought him his first recognition and led him to begin to consider that he could have a career as a playwright. Miller enrolled in a playwriting seminar taught by the influential Professor Kenneth Rowe, who instructed him in his early forays into playwriting; Rowe emphasized how a play is built in order to achieve its intended effect, or what Miller called "the dynamics of play construction". Rowe provided realistic feedback along with much-needed encouragement, and became a lifelong friend. 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 a BA 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 in 1939. Miller began working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard while continuing to write radio plays, some of which were broadcast on CBS.

In 1940, he married Mary Grace Slattery. The couple had two children, Jane and Robert (born May 31, 1947). Miller was exempted from military service during World War II because of a high-school football injury to his left kneecap.

Early career

Miller wrote The Man Who Had All the Luck, which was produced in New Jersey in 1940 and won the Theatre Guild's National Award. The play closed after four performances with disastrous reviews.

In his book Trinity of Passion, author Alan M. Wald conjectures that Miller was "a member of a writer's unit of the Communist Party around 1946," using the pseudonym Matt Wayne, and editing a drama column in the magazine The New Masses.

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 1952, Kazan appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC); unwilling to risk his promising career in Hollywood for the Communist cause that he had come to despise, 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. After speaking with Kazan about his testimony Miller traveled to Salem, Massachusetts to research the witch trials of 1692. The Crucible, in which Miller likened the situation with the House Un-American Activities Committee to the witch hunt in Salem in 1692, opened at the Beck Theatre on Broadway on January 22, 1953. Though widely considered only somewhat successful at the time of its initial release, today The Crucible is Miller's most frequently produced work throughout the world and was adapted into an opera by Robert Ward, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1962. 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, and they did not speak to each other for the next ten years. The 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. Kazan defended his own actions through his film On the Waterfront, in which a dockworker heroically testifies against a corrupt union boss.

Miller's experience with the 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. 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.

1956–1964

In 1956, 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.

In June 1956, Miller left his first wife Mary Slattery and on June 29 he married Marilyn Monroe. Miller and Monroe had met in April 23, 1951, when they had a brief affair, and had remained in contact since then.

When Miller applied in 1956 for a routine renewal of his passport, the HUAC 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 $500 fine or thirty days in prison, blacklisted, and disallowed a US passport. In 1958, his conviction was overturned by the court of appeals, which ruled that Miller had been misled by the chairman of the HUAC.

Miller began work on The Misfits, starring his wife. Miller later said that the filming was one of the lowest points in his life; shortly before the film's premiere in 1961, the pair divorced. 19 months later, Monroe died of a possible drug overdose. Miller's future wife Inge Morath worked as a photographer documenting the film's production. The film proved to be the last appearances for both Monroe and Clark Gable, and one of the last for Montgomery Clift.

Miller married photographer Inge Morath on February 17, 1962 and the first of their two children, Rebecca, was born September 15, 1962. Their son Daniel was born with Down syndrome in November 1966; he was institutionalized and excluded from the Millers' personal life at Arthur's insistence. The couple remained together until Inge's death in 2002. Arthur Miller's son-in-law, actor Daniel Day-Lewis, is said to have visited Daniel frequently, and to have persuaded Arthur Miller to reunite with his adult son, Daniel.

Later career

In 1964 Miller's next play was produced. After the Fall is a deeply personal view of Miller's 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. 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 same year, Miller produced Incident at Vichy. In 1965, Miller was elected the first American president of PEN International, a position which he held for four years. A year later, Miller organized the 1966 PEN congress in New York City. Miller also wrote the penetrating family drama, The Price, produced in 1968. It was Miller's most successful play since Death of a Salesman.

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.

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. The play 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 made into a TV movie starring Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman. Shown on CBS, it attracted 25 million viewers. 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; in Timebends Miller talks about his experiences with Monroe in detail.

During the early-mid 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, Paul Scofield, Bruce Davison, 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.

In 1993, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. Miller 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 (NEH) selected Miller for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Miller's lecture was entitled "On Politics and the Art of Acting." Miller's lecture analyzed political events (including the U.S. presidential election of 2000) in terms of the "arts of performance," and it drew attacks from some conservatives such as Jay Nordlinger, who called it "a disgrace,"  and George Will, who argued that Miller was not legitimately a "scholar."

In 1999, Miller was awarded The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, one of the richest prizes in the arts, 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, Miller received the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. On May 1, 2002, Miller was awarded 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, the 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. Within hours of her father's death, Rebecca Miller ordered Barley to vacate the premises, having consistently opposed the relationship. 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 reported to be based on his experience during the filming The Misfits, though Miller insisted the play is a work of fiction with independent characters that were no more than composite shadows of history.

Death

Miller died of heart failure after a battle against cancer, pneumonia and congestive heart disease at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. He had been in hospice care at his sister's apartment in New York since his release from hospital the previous month. He died on the evening of February 10, 2005 (the 56th anniversary of the Broadway debut of Death of a Salesman), aged 89, surrounded by Barley, family and friends. He is interred at Roxbury Center Cemetery in Roxbury.

Legacy

Arthur Miller's career as a writer spanned over seven decades, and at the time of his death, Miller was considered to be one of the greatest dramatists of the twentieth century. After his death, many respected actors, directors, and producers paid tribute to Miller, some calling him the last great practitioner of the American stage, and Broadway theatres darkened their lights in a show of respect. Miller's alma mater, the University of Michigan, opened the Arthur Miller Theatre in March 2007. As per his express wish, it is the only theatre in the world that bears Miller's name. Two months after Miller died Peter O'Toole called him a "bore". Roger Kimball considered Miller's artistic accomplishments meager.

Christopher Bigsby wrote Arthur Miller: The Definitive Biography based on boxes of papers Miller made available to him before his death in 2005. The book was published in November 2008, and is reported to reveal unpublished works in which Miller "bitterly attack[ed] the injustices of American racism long before it was taken up by the civil rights movement".

Miller's papers are housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin.

Arthur Miller is also a member of the American Theater Hall of Fame. He was inducted in 1979.

Works

Stage plays

• No Villain (1936)
• They Too Arise (1937, based on No Villain)
• Honors at Dawn (1938, based on They Too Arise)
• The Grass Still Grows (1938, based on They Too Arise)
• The Great Disobedience (1938)
• Listen My Children (1939, with Norman Rosten)
• The Golden Years (1940)
• The Man Who Had All the Luck (1940)
• The Half-Bridge (1943)
• All My Sons (1947)
• Death of a Salesman (1949)
• An Enemy of the People (1950, based on Henrik Ibsen's play An Enemy of the People)
• The Crucible (1953)
• A View from the Bridge (1955)
• A Memory of Two Mondays (1955)
• After the Fall (1964)
• Incident at Vichy (1964)
• The Price (1968)
• The Reason Why (1970)
• Fame (one-act, 1970; revised for television 1978)
• The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972)
• The Archbishop's Ceiling (1977)
• The American Clock (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)
• I Think About You a Great Deal (1986)
• Playing for Time (stage version, 1985)
• I Can’t Remember Anything (1987, collected in Danger: Memory!)
• Clara (1987, collected in Danger: Memory!)
• The Last Yankee (1991)
• The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991)
• Broken Glass (1994)
• Mr Peter’s Connections (1998)
• Resurrection Blues (2002)
• Finishing the Picture (2004)

Radio plays

• The Pussycat and the Expert Plumber Who Was a Man (1941)
• Joel Chandler Harris (1941)
• Captain Paul (1941)
• The Battle of the Ovens (1942)
• Thunder from the Mountains (1942)
• I Was Married in Bataan (1942)
• That They May Win (1943)
• Listen for the Sound of Wings (1943)
• Bernardine (1944)
• I Love You (1944)
• Grandpa and the Statue (1944)
• The Philippines Never Surrendered (1944)
• The Guardsman (1944, based on Ferenc Molnár’s play)
• The Story of Gus (1947)

Screenplays

• All My Sons (1948)
• The Hook (1947)
• Let's Make Love (1960)
• The Misfits (1961)
• Everybody Wins (1984)
• Death of a Salesman (1985)
• The Crucible (1995)
• Mr. Peters' Connections (1998)

Assorted fiction

• Focus (novel, 1945)
• "The Misfits" (novella, 1957)
• I Don’t Need You Anymore (short stories, 1967)
• "Homely Girl" (short story, 1992, published in UK as "Plain Girl: A Life" 1995)
• "The Performance" (short story)
• Presence: Stories (short stories, 2007)

Non-fiction

• 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 photographs 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 Zedong'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, understandings, and insights encountered in directing a Chinese cast in a decidedly American play.
• Timebends: A Life, Methuen London (1987) ISBN 0-413-41480-9. Like Death of a Salesman, the book follows the structure of memory itself, each passage linked to and triggered by the one before.

Collections

• Kushner, Tony, ed. Arthur Miller, Collected Plays 1944–1961 (Library of America, 2006) ISBN 978-1-931082-91-4.
• Martin, Robert A. (ed.), "The theater essays of Arthur Miller", foreword by Arthur Miller. NY: Viking Press, 1978 ISBN 0-14-004903-7.
• Steven R Centola, ed. Echoes Down the Corridor: Arthur Miller, Collected Essays 1944–2000, Viking Penguin (US)/Methuen (UK), 2000 ISBN 0-413-75690-4

Biographies and critical studies of Miller

• File on Miller, Christopher Bigsby (1988)
• Arthur Miller & Company, Christopher Bigsby, editor (1990)
• Arthur Miller: A Critical Study, Christopher Bigsby (2005)
• Remembering Arthur Miller, Christopher Bigsby, editor (2005)
• Arthur Miller 1915–1962, Christopher Bigsby (2008, U.K.; 2009, U.S.)
• The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller (Cambridge Companions to Literature), Christopher Bigsby, editor (1998, updated and republished 2010)
• Arthur Miller 1962–2005, Christopher Bigsby (February 2011)

Critical Articles

• Radavich, David. "Arthur Miller's Sojourn in the Heartland." American Drama 16:2 (Summer 2007): 28–45.