Arthur Miller – Author Biography
Arthur Miller was the conscience of the American theater — the playwright of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, whose tragedies of ordinary people and moral choice made him one of the greatest dramatists of the twentieth century.
Early Life
Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in Harlem, New York City, to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents; his father was a successful coat manufacturer ruined by the Great Depression, an experience that marked Miller deeply. He worked his way through the University of Michigan, where he began writing plays and won the Avery Hopwood Award. After graduating in 1938, he wrote radio scripts and worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard before his stage career began.
Career
Miller’s first Broadway success was All My Sons (1947), a drama of wartime profiteering. Then came the one-two punch that made him immortal: Death of a Salesman (1949), the tragedy of Willy Loman, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and is often called the greatest American play; and The Crucible (1953), his allegory of the Salem witch trials aimed squarely at McCarthyism — written as Miller himself was being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which eventually cited him for contempt of Congress (a conviction later overturned). Later plays include A View from the Bridge (1955), After the Fall (1964), and The Price (1968). His 1956 marriage to Marilyn Monroe made him a tabloid fixture; they divorced in 1961, the year he wrote the screenplay for her final film, The Misfits. He continued writing plays, essays, and fiction into his eighties.
Major Works
Death of a Salesman (1949) is his masterpiece — Willy Loman’s delusions and destruction as an indictment of the American Dream. The Crucible (1953) turned the Salem witch trials into a timeless parable of hysteria and political persecution. All My Sons (1947) and A View from the Bridge (1955) complete his core canon of moral tragedies.
Writing Style and Themes
Miller wrote social-realist tragedy in muscular, plainspoken American prose, with expressionistic touches — memory scenes, lighting effects — that externalize inner life. His great theme is moral responsibility: his characters must answer for their choices, and society must answer for crushing the individual. He democratized tragedy, insisting that the common man — a salesman, a longshoreman — is as fit a subject for tragedy as any king. Guilt, betrayal, the corruption of the American Dream, and the courage to name the truth recur throughout.
Legacy
Miller died on February 10, 2005, at eighty-nine. He won the Pulitzer Prize, multiple Tony Awards, and the Kennedy Center Honors, and Death of a Salesman and The Crucible are performed constantly around the world — the latter revived every time a society turns to scapegoating. Alongside Tennessee Williams, he defined postwar American theater, and his insistence that drama should matter morally remains his enduring challenge to playwrights.
