Sheffield Theatres Education Resource

Arthur Aster Miller was born in Harlem, New York in 1915. The son of a Polish Jew who had emigrated to America as a child and had become a successful businessman in women’s coat manufacturing. His mother was a school teacher.

As a teenager his fathers’ business collapsed with the Stock Market crash of 1929. Due to financial difficulties Miller and his family moved to Brooklyn, New York. The period of American history called the Great Depression followed. As a child living in the Depression he could not help but be profoundly affected by it. Firstly, his family were forced to move and his father was made bankrupt. On a much larger scale Miller witnessed the day to day struggle to survive of those around him. Miller acknowledges this as a period of time that deeply influences his writing in the sense that his plays often reflect the social issues of that period as well as the struggle for survival.

After graduating from high school he worked in a warehouse where he was the only Jew employed and experienced, first-hand, the Anti-Semitism that would inform his work. Gradually, he saved up enough money to attend The University of Michigan. He began his studies majoring in Journalism and writing for the student paper. Here he also began to write plays, winning prizes for his work. Two years into his studies he transferred to an English major taking up playwriting studies, but it would not be until after the Second World War in 1945 that he would become truly recognised as a major playwright. His political views were also influenced at this time by the Spanish Civil War and many of his friends joined the American supporters and fighters in Spain.

After graduating from University in 1938 he joined The Federal Theatre Project which encouraged young playwrights to write scripts and radio plays. Regrettably funding ceased and the project closed. During the war years, he took on a manual job in a warehouse and wrote numerous plays for American radio stations.

In 1944 having written original radio plays as well as adapting the work of authors such as Jane Austen for radio, he toured army camps to gain research for his first screenplay, The Story of GI Joe. He later withdrew from the project and in the same year published a book about his research experiences titled Situation Normal. In the same year his play The Man Who Had All The Luck premièred on Broadway closing after a few performances and receiving negative reviews from some although it later won the Theatre Guild National Award. Its theme was the American Dream - the belief that however rich or poor, anything is attainable if you work hard enough for it. To this day the American Dream remains an integral part of American society and America's obsession with this belief was to become a trademark of Millers. A year later he published his first successful novel Focus which explored the subject of Anti-Semitism, a subject he knew about first-hand.

In the two years that followed Miller published very little in terms of his previous output of work but in 1947 his play All My Sons premièred in Broadway and was a resounding financial and critically acclaimed hit winning Miller the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, amongst others. Directed by Elia Kazan, the play deals with war and its corruption of business whereby a small time manufacturer sells defective plane parts and believes himself to be responsible for the death of a number of servicemen. The moral dilemma of his ‘crime’ as well as the impact it has on his family, especially his sons, is at the centre of the piece and with this play Miller became established as the modern, social playwright. Nevertheless, rather than glow in the limelight of success, Miller instead took on a minimum paid job in a factory - to keep his feet on the ground.

Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller in 1967 (AP Photo)

In 1949 his next Broadway play, Death of a Salesman, also directed by Elia Kazan, premièred and is considered to be one of the most famous plays in history. It won a Pulitzer Prize, the Antoinette Perry Award, the Donaldson Award, the Theatre Club Award as well as the New York Drama Critics Award. Here the subject matter was again the American Dream, this time immortalised in the character of Willy Loman, a travelling salesman who feels that his life has slipped away from him. Contemplating his suicide, the play raises the questions of the relationship between society and the common man. It established Miller as one of America’s greatest playwrights.

In the period 1950-1952 Miller premièred very little although Death of a Salesman continued to be performed throughout America. It was in this period that Miller also began his research into the Salem witch trials which inform his play The Crucible, and this premièred in 1953. For further information on The Crucible please click on the background link.

His plays A Memory of Two Mondays and A View From The Bridge followed in 1955. A Memory of Two Mondays is based considerably upon Miller’s experiences in Brooklyn, specifically the place he worked to save money for college and it centres on the people he met and the effects of the Great Depression. A View From the Bridge was originally a one act play performed alongside A Memory of Two Mondays but was later extended for the London production. Here the play dissects the crumbling family of a Brooklyn dockworker in the 1950’s.

From 1955 to 1963 Miller received awards for his work but his writing output was small, in most part because of the political time (see background). In 1957 he wrote a short story titled The Misfits but it was not until 1961 that it became a film starring his then ex-wife, the legendary Marilyn Monroe, who died a year later.

In 1963 he wrote his first children’s book Jane’s Blanket and along with his wife Inge, he covered the Nazi war trials in Germany for the New York Herald Tribune. In 1964 his two plays After the Fall and Incident at Vichy premiered. After the Fall was considered by reviewers to be an autobiographical work and received criticism from the press in the way they believed Miller was tainting the memory of Marilyn Monroe. In this play, and with Incident at Vichy, Miller returns again to the theme and the effects of the Holocaust.

During the years 1964 to 1967 Miller travelled, visiting Germany, Yugoslavia and Moscow. He was elected President of International P.E.N, the international literacy association and spent time in Moscow trying to persuade Russian writers to join the association.

In 1968 his play The Price premièred. In the play Miller returns again to the Father/Son relationship and the effects the Great Depression had upon family life. It is a play which explores the common man - his life, choices, achievements and failures. In the following year his book In Russia was published. In the latter part of the 1960’s he visited Czechoslovakia to support writers there and retired later in the decade as President of P.E.N. The following year his book was banned in the Soviet Union as a result of his support for Soviet writers.

In the 70’s much of his work was recorded for television and radio and in 1972 he premièred his play The Creation of the World and Other Business. He also published two more works of non-fiction In The Country and Chinese Encounters and his Theatre Essays were published. Additionally, the 25th anniversary production of The Crucible premièred.

During the 1980s his Collected Plays were published and he wrote his autobiography Timebends: A Life which reveals his personal life and political views. He directed Death of a Salesman in Beijing as well as premièring further plays including re-writings. In 1985 Death of a Salesman starring Dustin Hoffman was shown to an audience of millions and Miller again became involved in the work of P.E.N and its attempts to stop the oppression of Soviet writers. Towards the end of the 1980’s a university renamed its American studies building as The Arthur Miller Centre.

During the 1990’s his previous work was continually produced on radio, in theatres and on television. Miller himself was the topic of television programmes investigating his life and work. In 1994 his play Broken Glass premièred and won an Olivier Award for Best New Play. Again, Miller returned to the subject of the Holocaust and the play is a study of the effects of Hitler’s persecution of the Jews seen through the eyes of an American family. From 1994 to the end of the decade Miller wrote one further play, Mr Peter’s Connections. Nevertheless, from his 80th Birthday in 1995 onwards, his time was taken in receiving awards such as the William Inge Festival Award for Distinguished Achievement in American Theatre, The Edward Albee Last Frontier Playwright Award and he was named as the Distinguished Inaugural Senior Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. In 1997 the film version of The Crucible premièred with the screenplay by Miller and starring Daniel Day Lewis and Winona Ryder.

During the new century he has published collections of his essays as well as the play Resurrection Blues in 2002. In 2004 he will premièr Finishing The Picture.

From the moment Death of a Salesman premièred in 1949, Miller’s work has been in almost constant production all over the world. His work is varied - from plays for radio, to plays for the theatre, novels and journals, books, screenplays and essays. He is considered by many to be the master of dialogue, writing superbly drawn characters and capturing the essence of the ordinary man. He is a playwright who is touched by those things around him, be it personal, social or political. His experiences influence and inform his work and he has, and will hopefully remain, an active political and social writer as well as one of the most important playwrights of the century.