Arthur Miller has been a powerful voice in American literature for more than fifty years. Although he is best known for his stage plays, Miller has also written many screenplays, novels, travel books, essays, and an autobiography. As this diverse list of literary genre shows, Miller has allowed his unique voice to speak through many literary forms.

Miller's first successes came through his stage plays. His first two triumphs were All My Sons (1947; film, 1948), winner of the Drama Critics Circle Award, and Death of a Salesman (1949; film, 1952), winner of both the Drama Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. These two plays condemned the American ideal of prosperity because, Miller argued, few can pursue it without making dangerous moral compromises. Death of a Salesman remains Miller's most widely admired work.

The keen social conscience evident in these plays has continued to surface in Miller's writing. In the Tony Award-winning The Crucible (1953; film, 1996), for instance, he wrote of the witch-hunts in colonial Salem, Mass., and compared them to the congressional investigations into "un-American" activity that Senator Joe McCarthy was leading in the early 1950s. The probing psychological tragedy A View from the Bridge (1955) questions the reasonableness of U.S. immigration laws. After the Fall (1964), which includes a thinly disguised portrayal of Miller's unhappy marriage to film actress Marilyn Monroe, offers a second, candid consideration of the congressional investigations in which Miller had been personally involved. Two one-act plays, Incident at Vichy (1964) and The Price (1968), deal with the universality of human responsibility and the guilt that often accompanies survival and success.

Miller's later dramatic works include The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), which seemed too preachy for both critics and audiences, and The Ride Down Mount Morgan (1991), which opened in London to mixed reviews. Although less successful than his earlier works, these two plays possess a passionate morality and show the absolute need for responsible, loving connections between people, as do most of Miller's work. However, Miller did achieve critical acclaim for his play Broken Glass (1995), which won the 1995 Olivier Award - Great Britain's equivalent to the Tony Award.

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In 1953, Miller's The Crucible won four Tony Awards: including two for Miller (Best Author and Best Play).
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Miller's writings outside the theater have been many and diverse. His novel Focus (1945) is an ironic tale of anti-Semitism. The screenplay for the film The Misfits (1961) is one of several he has written. In 1969 he wrote In Russia, a travel piece with illustrations by his wife, the photographer Ingeborg Morath. Chinese Encounters (1979) is another traveler's tale, while Salesman in Beijing (1984) is an account of the production of Death of a Salesman in China. The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller were collected in 1978. In 1987, Miller published Timebends: A Life - his autobiography.