Arthur Miller (1915–2005) was an American playwright best known for All My Sons (1947,) Death of a Salesman (1949,) The Crucible (1953,) and other plays that analyzed the American dream and social conscience.
Miller was born in New York City to an affluent owner of a coat factory. His family lost everything in the stock market crash of 1929 and lived in noticeably reduced circumstances during the Great Depression. His life experiences shaped Miller’s dramatic mission, and his subjects and themes.
In high school, Miller was more absorbed in sports than studies. After graduating from high school in 1932, he went to work in an auto parts warehouse in Manhattan. It was during his subway commute to and from his work that Miller began reading books, discovering both the power of serious literature to change the way one sees the world. He once declared, “A book that changed my life was Fyodor Dostoyevsky‘s] The Brothers Karamazov which I picked up. I don’t know how or why, and all at once believed I was born to be a writer.”
Miller was accepted as a journalism student at the University of Michigan where he wrote his first play (despite having seen only two plays years before) to contest for prize money he needed for tuition. He failed in his first attempt but eventually won the award twice. After graduation, he returned to New York City. He had his first professional premiere with his play The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944,) but it closed after just four performances on Broadway. He refused to concede defeat, though.
Within a few years, Miller’s All My Sons (1947) ran for 328 performances, won a Tony Award, and was made into a movie the following year. It premiered 18 months after Imperial Japan surrendered in World War II, and audiences were ready for a back-from-the-war story. All My Sons was about a man who sold faulty machinery to the Army and finds out that he has caused the death of 21 soldiers.
Miller’s most famous play, Death of a Salesman (1949) remains as popular as ever. Narrating the last 24 hours of the aging and failing traveling salesman Willy Loman who is betrayed by the American dream, Death of a Salesman realizes its outstanding tenacity and propose from an extraordinarily intimate and staunch portrait of a family divided by its collective dreams and confined by its unspoken secrets. The play won a Tony, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Miller earned praise censure for his critique of American life and values.
Miller is also famous for his four-year-marriage to Marilyn Monroe, during which, Miller created nothing for the stage but produced his first film script, The Misfits (1960,) starring his wife.
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The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.
—Arthur Miller
Topics: Tragedy
The job is to ask questions–it always was–and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.
—Arthur Miller
An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.
—Arthur Miller
Without alienation, there can be no politics.
—Arthur Miller
Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
—Arthur Miller
Topics: Life
I cannot sleep for dreaming; I cannot dream but I wake and walk about the house as though I’d find you coming through some door.
—Arthur Miller
Topics: Dreams
Fear, like love, is difficult to explain after it has subsided, probably because it draws away the veils of illusion as it disappears.
—Arthur Miller
The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.
—Arthur Miller
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