Biography
Arthur Miller was born in New York City on October 17, 1915. He lived with his family in their Manhattan penthouse until the Great Depression ruined his fathers garment factory. He then lived in Harlem, and the move clearly had an influence on his on his writing. In high school he was more of an athlete than an intellectual. He spent two years after graduation working low end jobs to save money for college. He studied journalism and drama at the University of Michigan, where his work, Honors at Dawn, won him a $250 cash prize and later the Avery Hopwood Award.
He returned to New York after graduating with his degree in 1938, where he wrote scripts for radio programs for CBS and NBC. He was not elegible for the draft due to a football related injury. He married his college sweetheart, Mary Slattery, in 1940, and eventually had two children with her.
His first broadway play was The Man Who Had All The Luck in 1944, which was followed by All My Sons in 1947. In 1949, Death Of A Salesman debuted, and won a Pulitzer Prize, three Tony Awards, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. It was the first play to ever win all three awards. In 1953 he was denied a passport to attend the premier of The Crucible in Brussels, a play that was probably influenced by the mass hysteria of the McCarthy era. Miller himself appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee for attending Communist Party meetings. Congress found Miller guilty of contempt for refusing to reveal names of other suspected communists in 1957, a conviction that was later reversed by the U.S Court of Appeals in 1958.
Miller divorced his wife in 1956, and married Marilyn Monroe just a couple of months later. He wrote the screenplay Misfits specifically for Monroe. Monroe's drug use however proved a strain on the marriage, and he eventually divorced her in 1961. A year later he married Inge Morath, and the union would produce two more children for Miller. His son, Daniel, was born in 1962 with Down Syndrome. He unfortunately appears to have ignored his sons existance after placing him in an institution.
He rekindled his play writing with the apparently autobiographical work, After The Fall, in 1964. He collaborated with his wife for a book in 1969, In Russia. He continued to be prolithic throughout his life writing plays, screenplays, and a few books. NBC ran the screen adaptation of his play, Fame, on television in 1978. Miller also directed Death Of A Salesman at the People's Art Theater in Bejing, China, in 1983, with a book titled Salesman In Beijing detailing the production published in 1984. Death Of A Salesman also aired on CBS in 1985, staring Dustin Hoffman. His autobiography, Timebends: A Lile, was first published in 1987, when it also appears as a Book-of-the-Month Club popular selection. Death Of A Salesman won another award in 1999, the Tony for Best Revival of a Play when it was revived on Broadway for it's fiftieth anniversary.
In 2002, his wife Inge died. Toward the end of 2004, he announced he had been living with a 34-year-old artist, Agnes Barley, and that they intended to marry. Miller, however, died at home of congestive heart failure on February 10, 2005. He leaves behind a lasting legacy of work that provokes audiences to question society and authority, and to look behind dreams into the grit of reality.