Arthur Miller (1915-2005). Biography and Creativity

Best known for a handful of plays he composed between 1947 and 1955, Arthur Miller was an accomplished dramatist, short story writer, novelist, essayist, and screenwriter, whose career spanned six decades. Among the most recognizable figures in 20th-century American letters, Miller was also famous for his sensational marriage to Marilyn Monroe, his leftist political beliefs, and his altercations with U.S. government officials. During the 1950s and 1960s, his public opposition to American red scare tactics made him an icon of political counterculture, giving him as much notoriety as his literary and dramatic works.

Today, with cold war fears a relic of America’s past, Miller’s legacy rests, not on his political posturing, but on his contributions to the American stage. Together with his contemporary TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Miller altered traditional conceptions about tragedy, broadening its scope to include the “common man.” Miller’s best works reveal how society intervenes, as cosmic forces do in ancient Greek tragedies, to produce inescapable and devastating consequences, not only for individuals, but also for families and communities.

In his essay “Tragedy and the Common Man,” Miller explains, “If the exaltation of tragic action were truly a property of the high-bred character alone, it is inconceivable that the mass of mankind should cherish tragedy above all other forms, let alone be capable of understanding it” (Theater Essays 3-4).

The second child of Isidore Miller and Augusta Barnett, Arthur Asher Miller was born in New York City on October 17, 1915, into a well-to-do Jewish family. Miller’s father emigrated from Poland at age six and, without learning how to read, established a successful garment manufacturing firm. Just before the stock market crash in 1929, his business, the Miltex Coat and Suit Company, employed a thousand workers. Miller’s mother was a first-generation American, also of Polish descent. Miller spent his youth and early adolescence in a large apartment overlooking Central Park, but when the Great Depression wiped out the family’s savings and decimated Miltex, the Miller clan relocated to a small Brooklyn apartment, where the young Arthur shared a tiny bedroom with his maternal grandfather.

The change in fortune took a heavy toll. Accustomed to luxury, Augusta grew bitter, and without the business success on which his identity was staked, Isidore struggled with depression. Although Miller’s parents’ marriage survived, a constant tension lingered between them. The gloomy household atmosphere left a lasting impression on Miller; his work frequently examines the psychological strain individuals and families endure when their dreams collapse. For Miller, as for other writers of his era, the depression was an important turning point in his social consciousness, a revelation that demonstrated how important economic systems are to the identity of Americans.

Although affected by the Great Depression’s toll on American life, Miller did not write about it during adolescence. Attending James Madison High and later transferring to Abraham Lincoln High, Miller was, at best, a mediocre student: He placed a low priority on education, excelling in athletics rather than academics. To help make ends meet, he worked several odd jobs before graduating in June 1933. That year, he applied to the University of Michigan but was rejected for poor grades. During the next application cycle, while clerking at an auto-parts warehouse, Miller wrote a letter to University of Michigan administrators requesting the reconsideration of his application. His perseverance paid off, and he was accepted on a probationary basis, matriculating in the 1934 autumn semester.

Miller thrived in Ann Arbor. With a reputation for both academic excellence and political radicalism, the University of Michigan shaped his career. He discovered a latent writing talent while working for the school newspaper, the Michigan Daily, for which he covered, among other issues, the creation of the United Auto Workers union. Journalism provided Miller an opportunity to use his developing intellect to investigate and analyze the working class, with whom he identified throughout his life. After reading the works of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Henrik Ibsen, Miller began writing creatively, hoping to translate his nascent social and political views onto the stage. In 1936, he wrote his first play, No Villain, which won Michigan’s prestigious Hopwood Award. By the time Miller graduated in June 1938, he had won a second Hopwood for Honors at Dawn and a competition sponsored by the Theater Guild for They Too Arise.

Between 1938 and 1944, Miller continued to develop his craft. Hired out of college by the Federal Theatre and Federal Writer’s Projects, a government-sponsored collective with a reputation for harboring communist sympathizers, Miller became a victim of politically motivated cutbacks, losing the job within months. Two years later, he married his college sweetheart, Mary Grace Slattery, with whom he had two children, Jane and Robert. As he settled into family life, World War II engulfed Europe. Because of a high school football injury, Miller was exempted from service.

His Jewish heritage, coupled with his growing social conscience, left him searching for a way to contest anti-Semitism, which had reached a fevered pitch both at home and abroad. Much as the depression did, the specter of Nazism preoccupied Miller for the rest of his career. In the six years following Miller’s college graduation, he experimented with different genres, writing several radio plays, a failed film script, a journalistic account of American soldiers preparing for World War II (Situation Normal, 1944), and a novel, The Man Who Had All the Luck.

The story of a man unable to enjoy his unlimited good fortune, The Man Who Had All the Luck examines what Miller calls “the law of life,” namely, that “people are always frustrated in some important regard” (Theater Essays 125). Unable to find a publisher for the novel, he rewrote it for the stage. On November 23, 1944, The Man Who Had All the Luck, Miller’s first professionally produced play, opened at New York’s Forrest Theatre. The success of seeing his work on Broadway was short lived; scathing reviews and poor turnout limited the play’s run to four performances. Disillusioned by the negative reception, Miller swore never to write another play. Instead, he returned to prose fiction, publishing Focus, a commercially successful novel about anti-Semitism, in 1945.

After completing Focus, Miller regained the courage to write for the stage, vowing to quit for good should his next effort fail. Equipped with a self-imposed ultimatum, Miller changed his approach to playwriting, aiming to appeal to a mass audience. Accustomed to composing plays in a few weeks, Miller spent two years writing All My Sons, which premiered at the Coronet Theatre on January 29, 1947. Reviews were mixed, but the New York Times, the city’s most influential newspaper, affirmed Miller’s talent: “All My Sons is an honest, forceful drama, an original play of superior quality by a playwright who knows his craft.”

Audiences agreed. Under Elia Kazan’s direction, All My Sons ran for 328 performances and earned many of Broadway’s most prestigious honors, including the Donaldson, Tony, and Drama Critics Circle Awards. Set in post-World War II middle America, All My Sons focuses on a family. In the serene atmosphere of an upper-middle-class backyard, the family patriarch and aging factory owner Joe Keller witnesses the unraveling of his “normal” life when his wife and son acknowledge Keller’s dirty secret that he knowingly sold defective airplane engines to the military, causing the death of 21 American pilots.

Faced with the enormity of his crime and unable to regain his family’s trust, Keller commits suicide. All My Sons marked a departure for Miller, not only giving him his first taste of success, but also ushering him into his mature period as a writer. Widely considered his first structurally sound play, All My Sons owes much to the 19th-century Norwegian playwright Ibsen, who introduced theatergoers to social realism. As does All My Sons, Ibsen’s most celebrated dramas progress in a linear direction; depict rational, photographically rendered characters; and advocate social reform.

Written in common language and stripped of psychological complexity, All My Sons achieved what Miller intended, namely, to make tragedy accessible to a nonspecialized, working-class audience. In his early years, Miller theorized, “The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost,” his metaphor for the way the past returns, not only haunting us but also affecting our present lives (Theater Essays 179). In his early works, Miller failed to put his theory into practice, often creating convoluted structures that, while they appealed to academics, did not necessarily connect with a common audience.

However, with All My Sons he crafts a play with a clear, easy-to-follow structure, enabling a larger audience to appreciate his art. As Steven R. Centola writes, Miller’s breakthrough occurred when he learned to create “dramatic action that, by its very movement—by its creation, suspension, and resolution of tension; its inexorable rush toward tragic confrontation—proves that the past is always present and cannot be ignored, forgotten, or denied” (Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller 50).

After All My Sons, Miller found himself in unfamiliar territory. In just a few months, his literary reputation had skyrocketed. Within a year, he was considered one of America’s most promising young playwrights. Yet, feeling as if he had exhausted the “Greco-Ibsen form,” he longed to make a unique stamp on the theater. The result was Death of a Salesman, which premiered at the Morosco Theatre on February 10, 1949. As does Joe Keller, the Salesman protagonist, Willy Loman, commits suicide when past failures become unbearable. Unlike All My Sons, Death of a Salesman combines present action with interior monologue and psychological confusion, weaving past and present into a tapestry of misguided optimism and false hope.

Abandoning the linear progression of his earlier dramas, Miller explores the collapse of the American dream in a collage of fabricated memories and irrational convictions. Routinely cited as the greatest 20th- century American play, Salesman was an immediate and lasting success. Its initial Broadway run lasted 742 performances and netted all the major New York drama awards as well as the Pulitzer Prize. In addition to the original production, the play has enjoyed three critically acclaimed Broadway revivals—in 1975, 1984, and 1999, starring, respectively, George C. Scott, Dustin Hoffman, and Brian Dennehy.

Miller was a staunch critic of U.S. capitalism throughout his life. Beginning in his Michigan days, he defended socialism as an alternative to what he considered a dehumanizing socioeconomic American landscape. As the depression faded and the United States regained its economic footing, the American socialist movement lost its momentum. Meanwhile, with cold war tensions erupting, many Americans, both inside and outside government, branded communist sympathizers as traitors. Between 1949 and 1954, the red scare dominated Miller’s career. In 1950, he wrote an adaptation of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, the tale of a man whose neighbors ostracize him for opposing an unethical town proposal, despite its economic benefits.

In the preface to the published text, Miller argued that the play’s chief concern is “the central theme of our social life today. . . . It is the question of whether the democratic guarantees protecting political minorities ought to be set aside in time of crisis. More personally, it is the question of whether one’s vision of the truth ought to be a source of guilt at a time when the mass of men condemn it as a dangerous and devilish lie” (Theater Essays 17).

In Miller’s next major project, The Crucible (1953), the hero, John Proctor, chooses to die rather than falsely accuse others of witchcraft. Disguised as a period piece about the 1692 Salem witch trials, The Crucible is an allegory for the communist witch hunts of the late 1940s and early 1950s, especially the McCarthy hearings. The play premiered just months after Miller and Elia Kazan had a falling out. The two had worked closely on a number of projects, including All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and a failed screenplay, The Hook. In a 1952 hearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Kazan revealed the names of several communist sympathizers, many of whom Miller knew.

After Kazan and Miller cut ties, Kazan directed On the Waterfront (1954), a film in which the lead character incriminates several corrupt mob bosses. Shortly afterward, Miller wrote A View from the Bridge (1954). Set in the same Brooklyn neighborhood as On the Waterfront, Bridge features a character, Eddie Carbone, whose community ostracizes him for betraying their code of silence. Compared with All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, neither The Crucible nor A View from the Bridge fared well at the box office. Reviews were mixed; their combined Broadway runs amounted to fewer than 350 performances, a disappointment for a playwright of Miller’s stature. Over the next few decades, audience appreciation of these neglected plays grew. Frequently performed throughout the world, both plays remain in the active repertory.

Over the next decade, Miller lived in the public spotlight. Off the stage, 1956 was an eventful year for him. In the span of one month, he divorced Mary Slattery, married Marilyn Monroe, and testified before HUAC. True to John Proctor’s example, Miller refused to “name names.” Fortunately, Miller did not face Proctor’s fate: Convicted of contempt in federal district court the following year, he was forced to pay a fine and sentenced to one month in jail. The conviction was overturned on appeal.

In 1957, Viking published Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays, which included an original introduction still considered required reading for drama students. At the time, however, Miller had turned his attentions away from the stage. He set his sights on Hollywood, where he wrote the screenplay for The Misfits, a film starring Monroe and Clark Gable. During production, his marriage collapsed. Within a week of The Misfits’s February 1, 1961, release, Monroe was granted a divorce. A year later, Miller married Inga Morath. The couple had two children: Rebecca, now a successful filmmaker, and Daniel, who was born with Down syndrome and committed to a home for the mentally retarded, about whom Miller never spoke in public.

After a nine-year hiatus from playwriting, Miller produced After the Fall in 1964, an expressionis- tic exploration of denial, guilt, and the Holocaust. The play ran for 59 performances at New York’s Lincoln Center, inciting controversy for its portrayal of Maggie, the female lead, whom many considered a Monroe replica. Several commentators thought Miller was exploiting his now-deceased former wife, who had overdosed on sleeping pills in 1962. Miller followed After the Fall with Incident at Vichy (1964), another examination of the Holocaust. As its predecessor, Vichy was met with mixed reviews and low audience turnout. In 1968, with his career on a two-decade decline, Miller enjoyed his greatest success since Death of a Salesman with The Price, which premiered on February 7 and ran for 429 performances. The story of two brothers who dredge up their personal histories in order to sort out their recently deceased father’s estate, The Price revisits a favorite Miller theme, namely, the inseparability of past and present.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Miller was actively involved in politics. He spoke frequently in opposition to the Vietnam War, attended the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention, and, as the president of PEN, advocated the release of imprisoned writers. As a writer, Miller remained productive until he died, but after The Price he never wrote another Broadway hit. In 1987 he published Timebends: A Life, in which, in addition to reflecting on his literary and political career, he openly discussed his marriage to Monroe for the first time. Broken Glass, a 1994 play about Jewish persecution in pre-World War II Europe, was Miller’s greatest late-career achievement.

Nominated for a Tony, it was even more popular in England, where it won London’s coveted Olivier Award as best new play. In 1996, Miller wrote an Academy Award-nominated screen adaptation of The Crucible. Nearly a decade later, when Miller was 88 years old, he completed his aptly titled final play, Finishing the Picture (2004). On February 10, 2005, Miller succumbed to congestive heart failure at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut.