Arthur Miller
(b. 1915)

Considered among the finest American playwrights of the contemporary era, Miller has chronicled the dilemma of common people pitted against powerful and unyielding social forces. His plays have earned acclaim from both critics and the general public.

Miller was born in New York City in 1915. During the Depression, his father suffered severe financial losses that forced the family to move from Manhattan to more modest quarters in Brooklyn. In the aftermath of his family's financial downfall, Miller dropped out of high school and worked as a shipping clerk in an automobile parts warehouse—an experience that he later dramatized in A Memory of Two Mondays (1955). Despite his inability to complete high school, in 1934 he persuaded the University of Michigan to accept him as a student and used his savings from his warehouse job to finance the first year of his studies.

It was in college that Miller first began to write plays. After graduation, he continued to write while holding a variety of jobs, including one at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. In 1947, his play All My Sons opened on Broadway. The play, which focuses on a businessman whose actions during World War II bring about the disintegration of his family, earned immediate critical acclaim and established Miller as one of the country's most promising playwrights.

Miller fulfilled this promise as a writer two years later, when he completed Death of a Salesman. He created, in the character of Willy Loman, a deluded and tragic protagonist whose obsessive and futile quest for material success evoked an ambivalent reaction from the audience. Death of a Salesman won a Pulitzer Prize and catapulted Miller to international fame.

Departing from a contemporary milieu, Miller wrote The Crucible in 1953. Although it depicts the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, the play was inspired by Miller's belief that the hysteria surrounding the witchcraft trials paralleled the contemporary political climate of McCarthyism—Senator Joseph McCarthy's obsessive quest to uncover communist infiltration of American institutions.

In 1956, the public spotlight became focused on Miller's personal life, when he married film star, Marilyn Monroe. During his five-year marriage to Monroe, Miller did little writing, though he did write the screenplay for The Misfits (1961), a film that starred Monroe. After the marriage ended in divorce, Miller once again became a prolific writer. His later plays include Vinchy (1964), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), The Archbishop's Ceiling (1977), and The American Clock (1980).

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