Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller is one of the titans of American theater. Born in 1915, Miller grew up in Manhattan and Brooklyn. His father owned a small clothing manufacturing company that was deeply affected by the Depression of 1929. The theme of American success from the point of view of the common man was to be Miller’s constant dramatic impulse through a six decade career. He said that after he read Dostoevski’s The Brothers Karamazov, as a teenager, he decided to be a writer. He was accepted as a journalism major at the University of Michigan. In 1938, he came to New York for writing jobs with Federal Theatre Project, and radio shows at CBS and NBC. His first Broadway play, The Man Who Had All the Luck, lasted for only four performances. His luck changed, though, in 1947 with the Broadway production of All My Sons, in which the American dream of monetary success competes with the responsibility to do what is right. His next play, Death of a Salesman (1949), won three Tony Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, Critics Circle Award, and has continued to be performed throughout the world – in fact, it is now available in 17 languages. In 1957, Miller was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to name names to Senator McCarthy’s House on Un-American Activities Committee. Although the conviction was overturned in 1958, Miller’s choice was the opposite of his friend, colleague and the director of his plays, Elia Kazan. Their relationship was never to be the same. Miller’s most regularly performed plays include The Crucible (1953), A View from the Bridge (1955), After the Fall (1964) about his five year marriage to Marilyn Monroe, All My Sons (1947), Incident at Vichy (1964), and The Price (1968). Miller died in 2005 having transformed American theater, believing that “Tragedy is the consequence of a man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself justly. ”
