Arthur Miller Biography

ARTHUR MILLER championed the idea of dignity for the common man, and his concern is evident in his plays: the wartime profiteer in All My Sons; the simple farmer standing against the public outcry in The Crucible; the struggling longshoremen of A View from the Bridge; the vast array of people wending their way through the Depression in The American Clock; and ultimately the defeated traveling salesman in Death of a Salesman. In doing so, Miller has examined the fate of all those who strive for success in America. Miller himself was born into a prosperous New York family in 1915. Yet by the time he graduated high school in 1932, at the height of the Depression, the family faced financial ruin. Miller went to work as a manual laborer, taking jobs in a car parts warehouse, on a farm, and around New York harbor. He was able to complete the journalism program at | the University of Michigan, where he also won the Avery Hopwood Award for playwriting. He headed back to New York, where he initially found work writing radio plays. Medically unfit for service during World War II, he toured the camps as a reporter. His first Broadway play, The Man Who Had All The Luck, had very little. It ran less than a week. However, his next play, All My Sons, won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and earned Miller a special citation at the very first Tony Award ceremony. Death of a Salesman came along two years later, opening in February of 1949 and securing Miller his place among America's greatest dramatists. Salesman won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony for Best Play, as well as the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. What followed would be a body of work that includes, among others, his translation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People (1950), The Crucible (1953), A View from the Bridge (1955), After the Fall (1964), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), The American Clock (1979), The Archbishop's Ceiling (1986), The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1992), and Broken Glass (1994). Most recently, Miller received an Academy Award nomination for his screen adaptation of The Crucible in 1996.

His classic dramas about, in many cases, unextraordinary people are told on the level of Shakespearean tragedy. Yet, as the traditions of the theatre tell us, tragedies are written about great men who are done in by a fatal flaw in their character. How could this apply to, for example, Willy Loman? Well, in an essay written shortly after Death of a Salesman premiered, Miller defended the idea that simple people could be the basis for a great tragic drama. He compared Willy Loman to King Lear, noting that both ultimately die in an effort to secure "a sense of personal dignity."

Miller has always attempted to illuminate that sense of personal dignity in "the common man" through his plays. Brooks Atkinson, reviewing Death of a Salesman in The New York Times, stated, "Mr. Miller has looked with compassion into the hearts of some ordinary Americans and quietly transferred their hope and anguish to the theatre."