ARTHUR MILLER
PLAYWRIGHT

The Life of Arthur Miller
Written and Designed by
David Biele, Arts in Education Consultant
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Arthur Miller was born in Manhattan, New York City, near the lower edge of Harlem in 1915. His father was a comfortably middle-class manufacturer of women's coats, and his mother was a schoolteacher. The Miller family moved to Brooklyn in the early l930s because the Great Depression had plunged them into great financial difficulty. These years of poverty and struggle influenced many of his plays.

After he graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, Arthur Miller spent the next two and a half years working as a stock clerk in an automobile parts warehouse until he had saved enough money to attend college at the University of Michigan. He finished college with financial aid from the National Youth Administration and from the money he earned as night editor of the Michigan Daily newspaper. While there, Miller began to write plays. Several of these dramatic efforts were rewarded with prizes, such as The Grass Still Grows, which won a $500 Avery Hopwood Award in 1936 and a $1,200 Theater Guild National Award in 1938.

Upon graduating from college in 1938, Miller returned home to New York. Here he married Mary Grace Slatter. They had two children, Jane and Robert. While back home, Miller also joined the Federal Theater Project, an arts program sponsored by the U.S. government. However, before his first play could be produced, the project ended. So, he worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and wrote radio scripts, which were aired on such radio programs as "Columbia Workshop" and "Cavalcade of America." He also wrote two novels during this time - Situation Normal (1944), a volume of material about army life, and Focus (1945) a novel about anti-Semitism.

Miller had not, however, given up on playwriting. In 1944, his play The Man Who Had All the Luck won a prize offered by New York City's Theatre Guild and received a Broadway production. The show, though, was not very lucky - it closed after only four performances.

It was not until three years later that Miller was able to find success on the stage. His play All My Sons debuted to positive critical reviews in 1947, and it was a big hit with audiences as well. This play established him as a significant voice in American theater. In his review of Miller's play, Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times wrote, "The theater has acquired a genuine new talent." The play also won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Donaldson Award, voted upon by subscribers to Billboard magazine. Arthur Miller later described the impact of All My Sons on his life in this way:

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"The success of a play, especially one's first success, is somewhat like pushing against a door which is suddenly opened that was always securely shut until then. For myself, the experience was invigorating. It suddenly seemed that the audience was a mass of blood relations, and I sensed a warmth in the world that had not been there before. It made it possible to dream of daring more and risking more."

Several of Miller's early plays won major awards; Death of a Salesman, however, took his career to a whole new level.

Many of Miller's plays are set in his native New York City.
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Two years later, with Death of a Salesman, Miller did indeed dare and risk more. Likewise, he gained more as well. With this play, Arthur Miller soared to new artistic heights and critics began to regard him as one of the greatest twentieth-century American playwrights. The show was a huge popular success, and ran for 742 performances at the Morosco Theatre.

The next several years were very good for Miller, during which time he had several hit plays, culminating with The Crucible, which debuted on Broadway in 1953, during the height of Senator Joe McCarthy's congressional investigations into "un-American" activities of U.S. citizens (which mostly meant involvement with the Communist Party). The early l95Os were a very tense time in American history; the cold war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union made many Americans extremely worried about the safety, and future of their nation, and Miller reflected the paranoia and hysteria of the time in The Crucible. As a result, Miller was denied a passport to Belgium to attend the opening of The Crucible there. Later, be was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and was asked to tell the committee members the names of U.S. citizens who were involved in communist activities. Miller refused, and was thus cited with contempt of Congress, a serious felony. This conviction, however, was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1958.

The mid-50s were also very turbulent times in Miller's personal life. In 1956 he divorced his wife and married actress, comedian, and sex symbol Marilyn Monroe, whom he had first met in Hollywood in the early 1950s. This event brought him great notoriety, but it also ended in divorce in 1961.

Miller then married photographer Ingeborg Morath in 1962, with whom he still shares a Roxbury, Connecticut home. The two of them have two children, Rebecca and Daniel. He still writes, although for the last fifteen years, he has achieved his greatest successes in London, where critical and popular success has been much warmer than it has been in the United States. He continues to be revered, however, as one of the greatest playwrights that America has yet produced.

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Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin was the chairperson of the House Un-American Activities Committee, to whom Miller was once called to testify.

Miller wrote about his rocky marriage to Hollywood legend Marilyn Monroe in his play After the Fall.
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Written and Designed by
David Biele, Arts in Education Consultant

Edited and Published by The Goodman Theatre
Richard Pettengill, Director of Arts in Education
Oscar Groves, Arts in Education Assistant