Literature / Great Playwrights
Brief biography of Arthur Miller
Life and works of American
playwright and screenwriter, Arthur Miller, one of America’s leading
playwrights. Death of a Salesman is regarded as his greatest play.
Arthur Miller, one of the most
prominent and popular American playwrights and screenwriters, wrote some of the
20th century’s most important and famous plays for the American
theater and film productions. His best known plays include Death of a Salesman, All My Sons and The
Crucible.
Miller was a Pulitzer Prize
winner for Drama. Married to the famous actress, Marilyn Monroe (1956 to 1961),
he was popular from the late 1940s until the early 1960s, during which he
testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Early Life of Arthur Miller
Arthur A. Miller was born on
October 17, 1915 in New York City. Just before the Great Depression his
father’s business shut down, reducing the family to near poverty. This change
in fortune strongly influenced Miller as seen in many of his plays depicting families
destroyed because they live by the rules of a society that says money is the
most important thing.
Initially, Miller was more
interested in sports than literature, but all that changed when he read The Brothers
Karamazov by Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. Miller decided to become a writer and enrolled
at the University of Michigan to study journalism.
Miller’s Plays All My Sons, The Death of a Salesman and The Crucible
Miller’s first successful play,
All My Sons (1947), was performed when he was 32 years old. The story is about
a factory owner who sells faulty aircraft parts during the Second World War. The
play clearly shows Miller’s belief that the desire for money in American
society encourages people to act immorally. This play has been influenced by Henrik
Ibsen’s The Master Builder.
Death of a Salesman, regarded Miller’s
greatest play, was produced two years later after All My Sons. It won him a
Pulitzer Prize in 1949. The story is about a man who kills himself when he
realizes he will never be considered a success.
His 1953 play, The Crucible, is based on the
17th-century Salem witch trials, actually an attack on the
anti-communist trials held during the McCarthy Era. He also wrote the screenplay
for Marilyn Monroe’s last movie, The Misfits.
Miller's description in writing for the stage:
"I am in the ultimate place of vision - you can't back me up any further.
Everything is inevitable, down to the last comma".
Legacy of Playwright
Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller died on February
10, 2005. His plays have always been delicately structured, mainly focused on
the major concerns of post-war America and the lives of the American people of
the time. His works, not necessarily
just a pre-occupation of guilt, show more importantly, that in order to redeem the
past, it should first be remembered.
Miller was the most popular
American playwright since his predecessor, Eugene O’Neill. His three greatest
plays, Death of a Salesman, All My Sons and The Crucible, have remained
popular.
Works by Arthur Miller:
All My Sons, 1947
Death of a Salesman, 1949
The Crucible, 1953
A View from the Bridge, 1955
Incident at Vichy, 1964
After the Fall, 1964
The American Clock, 1980
The Last Yankee, 1990
Broken Glass, 1994
Plain Girl, 1995
Photo Credit:
Arthur Miller. Public Domain
Resources:
Goring, Rosemary, Ed. Larousse Dictionary of
Writers. New York: Larousse, 1994
Oxford Who's Who in the 20th
Century. Oxford: OUP, 1999
Payne, Tom. The A-Z of Great Writers. London: Carlton, 1997
Note: I originally wrote this piece for Suite101.com, June 28, 2010. It is being republished in short version for Inspired Pen Web.
(c) October 17, 2019. Tel. Inspired Pen Web. All rights reserved.
