About Arthur Miller
"I am constantly awed by what an individual is, by the endless possibilities in him for good and evil, by his unpredictability, by the possibilities he has for any betrayal, any cruelty, as well as any altruism, any sacrifice."

Newsweek Magazine's obituary
for Arthur Miller (February 15, 2005)

Back in the late '60s, Arthur Miller was on vacation in the Caribbean and spotted a man, standing ankle deep in the surf, who proved to be Mel Brooks. Now, in all of American theater, Brooks, for whom irreverent is too solemn a word, is as close as you'll find to the earnest Miller's evil twin. Brooks asked what he was up to, and Miller said he'd just finished a play called "The Price." What was it about? "Well," Miller began, "there are these two brothers--" "Stop!" Brooks yelled. "I'm crying!"

The beauty of it is, Miller told this story on himself. Despite his lofty public persona, there was nothing wrong with his sense of self-irony: he could see that to a Mel Brooks, working-class tragedy might seem like melodrama. It was just that Miller, however much his plays might be rooted in his own experience, had a notion of art that led him to aspire beyond the merely personal. "Great drama is great questions," he wrote in his autobiography, "or it is nothing but technique."

Miller's plays, along with those of Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams, practically defined the American theater in the 20th century, when drama was still a central force in the culture. Two of those plays, at least, "Death of a Salesman" (1949) and "The Crucible" (1953), will be produced for as long as companies continue to do O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night" and Williams's "The Glass Menagerie"--even Chekhov, Ibsen and Shakespeare.

But of course, people will also continue to chew over his five-year marriage to Marilyn Monroe. Miller did. She was a recurring obsession in his later work: from "The Misfits," the screenplay he wrote for her in 1960, to "After the Fall" (1964) to last year's "Finishing the Picture." For Miller, as for many others, Monroe was the American Dream--a phrase he used with capital letters and no irony--in all its glamour and grief. He also loved her, and she proved a subject he could never quite get his head around. "With all her radiance," he wrote, "she was surrounded by a darkness that perplexed me." Even if posterity judges "After the Fall" no more kindly than contemporary critics did, Miller was fearless enough never to back away from a challenge--even one that might have been too big for him.

Miller's best work has improved with age, as its topical urgency fades to reveal an archetypal subtext. "The Crucible" no longer seems to be "about" McCarthyism in the allegorical guise of the Salem witch trials; now it's a tragedy of paranoia, repressed sexuality and group hysteria. And if Miller's people, particularly the striving salesman Willy Loman, have worn better than his grand themes, Miller was humble enough to know that how his work would be seen was the audience's decision, not his. "You do what you can do," he told an interviewer last year, "and the rest is up to the Zeitgeist."

See also
Millier biography from ARTSEDGE at the Kennedy Center

 

---

A Bibliography (1915-2005)

1944   Situation Normal.
Hired by the producer of the film G.I. Joe (1945) to gather research material for an honest, un-Hollywood depiction of military life, the twenty-nine-year-old playwright toured army camps and publishes his field notes in this collection, documenting the process of turning civilians into soldiers. Miller would later cowrite the screenplay.

1944   The Man Who Had All the Luck.
Miller's playwriting debut concerns an auto mechanic's uncanny success in marriage and business. It is dismissed as "incredibly turbid in its writing and stuttering in its execution" and folds after only four performances. Raised in Brooklyn, Miller attended the University of Michigan and intended to work as a journalist before winning an Avery Hopwood Prize for his first dramatic script.

1945   Focus.
Miller's only adult novel deals with anti-Semitism, as an American named Newman begins to wear glasses and is mistaken for a Jew, becoming the target of prejudice and persecution.

1947   All My Sons.
Wartime corruption, family secrets, and moral accountability are the themes of Miller's drama about a manufacturer who knowingly sells defective parts to the military, causing planes to crash in battle. He is made to see the truth about his actions by his idealistic young son. The play establishes Miller as one of the most promising playwrights of his generation.

1949   Death of a Salesman.
Willy Loman, an aging salesman "riding on a smile and a shoe shine," confronts the consequences of his career on the road in the decade's most acclaimed play. A lacerating portrait of a man, his family, and the concept of the American Dream, Miller's play wins the Pulitzer Prize and is widely regarded as one of the most significant accomplishments of the American theater.

1953   The Crucible.
The parallels between the Salem witchcraft trials and the McCarthy hearings are inescapable in Miller's drama about John Proctor's decision whether to make a false confession and save himself or maintain his integrity. Running for only 197 performances on Broadway, the play would become one of Miller's most admired and frequently revived, filmed, and televised dramas.

1955    A View From the Bridge
Miller's drama about romance and revenge among Italian longshoremen premieres on Broadway as half of a double bill with A Memory of Two Mondays (1955). Miller would subsequently revise and expand the play, to be successfully presented off-Broadway in 1965 and revived on several occasions.

1961   The Misfits.
Miller writes the screenplay for the John Huston film about a woman who comes to Nevada for a divorce and gets involved with cowboys herding horses for slaughter. It provides the last screen roles for Miller's then-wife Marilyn Monroe and film legend Clark Gable. The short story upon which Miller's screenplay is based would be published in his story collection I Don't Need You Anymore (1967).

1964   After the Fall.
Miller's drama depicts a middle-aged lawyer trying to make sense of his life and his relationships with his mother, his first wife, and his prospective third wife. The drama has been viewed as an autobiographical probing of the playwright's failed marriage to actress Marilyn Monroe. Also produced is Incident at Vichy, about a group of Frenchmen arrested by the Nazis in 1942.

1968   The Price.
Miller achieves a popular stage success in this powerful family drama depicting two brothers disposing of the family's possessions.

1972   The Creation of the World and Other Business.
Miller's dramatic treatment of the Book of Genesis fails with both critics and audiences and closes quickly.

1977   The Archbishop's Ceiling.
Performed at Washington's Kennedy Center, Miller's play is a response to Soviet treatment of dissident writers in which a prominent novelist must decide whether to choose exile or a treason trial.

1980   The American Clock.
Set in Miller's familiar territory of 1930s Depression-era America, the play features documentary-style montages and vignettes that are meant to capture the spirit of the times in much the same way that Studs Terkel did in Hard Times. The play has no single plot line but rather is a collage of scenes, reminiscent of John Dos Passos's U.S.A.

1987   Danger: Memory!
This work collects two one-act plays: I Can't Remember Anything and Clara. Each is performed at New York's Lincoln Center.

1987   Timebends.
This autobiography is a cinematically constructed work, roaming back and forth between Miller's life and works--rather like a film with flashbacks, montages, and fades. He deals with his controversial leftist politics and his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, analyzing the mistakes he made in public and in private.

1992   The Ride Down Mount Morgan.
First produced in London in 1991, Miller's play concerns a prosperous charismatic businessman caught in a farcical relationship with a first wife (whom he has not divorced) and a second; both reflect his unquenchable appetite and feeling that the law does not apply to him. Critics feel that Miller gets considerable humor out of this manic character while also exploring the mayhem created by overweening egos.

1993   The Last Yankee.
This one-act play had debuted in 1991; revised and expanded, it runs at New York's Manhattan Theatre Club. Miller's drama is set in a mental hospital and deals with two woman suffering from clinical depression who are visited by their husbands.

1994   Broken Glass.
Miller's first full-length play on Broadway since The American Clock (1984) explores the impact of the Holocaust from the perspective of the physical and sexual paralysis of a woman as a result of the persecution of Jews in Germany during and after Kristallnacht, the "night of broken glass," in November 1938.

1998   Mr. Peters' Connections.
Written as the final play for New York's Signature Theater Company's 1997-1998 season, dedicated to Miller's work, the play takes place inside the protagonist's mind and concerns Mr. Peters's search for meaning in life.