Nationality: American. Born: New York, 17 October 1915. Education: University of Michigan, A.B. 1938. Family: Married 1) Mary Grace Slattery in 1940 (divorced 1956), one daughter and one son; 2) Marilyn Monroe in 1956 (divorced 1961); 3) Ingeborg Morath in 1962, one daughter and one son. Career: Since 1938 writer, and since 1944 dramatist and essayist. Associate, Federal Theater Project, 1938; writer of radio plays, 1939-44. Contributor to periodicals, including Esquire, Atlantic, New York Times, and Theatre Arts. Also worked in an automobile parts warehouse, at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, and in a box factory. Resident lecturer, University of Michigan, 1973-74. Awards: Avery Hopwood awards, University of Michigan, 1936, for Honors at Dawn, and 1937, for No Villain: They Too Arise; Bureau of New Plays prize, Theatre Guild of New York, 1938; Theatre Guild National prize, 1944, for The Man Who Had All the Luck; Drama Critics Circle awards, 1947, for All My Sons, and 1949, for Death of a Salesman; Antoinette Perry awards, 1947, for All My Sons, 1949, for Death of a Salesman, and 1953, for The Crucible; Donaldson awards, 1947, for All My Sons, 1949, for Death of a Salesman, and 1953, for The Crucible; Pulitzer prize for drama, 1949, for Death of a Salesman; National Association of Independent Schools award, 1954; Obie award, Village Voice, 1958, for The Crucible; American Academy of Arts and Letters gold medal, 1959; Anglo-American award, 1966; Emmy award, National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, 1967, for Death of a Salesman; Brandeis University creative arts award, 1969; George Foster Peabody award, 1981, for Playing for Time; John F. Kennedy award for lifetime achievement, 1984; Algur Meadows award, 1991; medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, National Book Foundation, 2001. L.H.D.: University of Michigan, 1956, and Carnegie-Mellon University, 1970. Member: Dramatists' Guild; Authors League of America; National Institute of Arts and Letters. Agent: c/o International Creative Management, 40 West 57th Street, New York, New York 10019, U.S.A.
Publication
Collections
Arthur Miller's Collected Plays (includes All My Sons ; Death of a Salesman ; The Crucible ; A Memory of Two Mondays ; A View from the Bridge ). 1957.
The Portable Arthur Miller, edited by Harold Clurman (includes Death of a Salesman ; The Crucible ; Incident at Vichy ; The Price ; The Misfits ; Fame ; In Russia ). 1971.
Collected Plays. 1980.
The Portable Arthur Miller, edited by C. Bigsby. 1995.
Plays
Honors at Dawn (produced Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1936).
No Villian: They Too Arise (produced Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1937).
The Man Who Had All the Luck (produced New York, 1944).
All My Sons (produced New York, 1947). 1947.
Death of a Salesman (produced New York, 1949). 1949; as Death of a Salesman: Text and Criticism, 1977.
An Enemy of the People, adaptation of the novel by Henrik Ibsen (produced New York, 1950). 1951.
The Crucible (produced New York, 1953). 1953; as The Crucible: Text and Criticism, 1977; as The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts, 1995.
A View from the Bridge (produced with A Memory of Two Mondays, New York, 1955), with A Memory of Two Mondays. 1955; published separately, 1956; revised version (produced New York, 1965), 1956.
A Memory of Two Mondays (produced with A View from the Bridge, New York, 1955), with A View from the Bridge. 1955; published separately, 1956.
After the Fall (produced New York, 1964). 1964.
Incident at Vichy (produced New York, 1964). 1965.
The Price (produced New York, 1968). 1968.
The Creation of the World and Other Business (produced New York, 1972). 1972.
Up from Paradise, musical version of The Creation of the World and Other Business, music by Stanley Silverman (produced Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1974; New York, 1983). 1978.
The Archbishop's Ceiling (produced Washington, D.C., 1977). 1976.
The American Clock (produced Charleston, South Carolina, 1980; New York, 1980). 1980.
The Misfits: An Original Screenplay Directed by John Huston. 1982.
Elegy for a Lady [and] Some Kind of Love Story (produced as Two-Way Mirror, New Haven, Connecticut, 1983). Published separately, 1984.
Playing for Time, stage adaption of his screenplay (produced England, 1986). 1985.
Danger: Memory! Two Plays: "I Can't Remember Anything" and "Clara" (produced New York, 1987). 1987.
The Golden Years. 1990.
The Last Yankee. 1991.
The Ride Down Mt. Morgan. 1992.
Broken Glass. 1994.
The Crucible: Screenplay. 1996.
Screenplays:
The Story of G.I. Joe, with others, 1945; The Crucible, 1958; The Misfits, 1960; The Price, 1969; The Hook, 1975; Playing for Time, 1980; Everybody Wins, 1990.
Television Play:
Fame, 1978.
Novels
Focus. 1945.
The Misfits (novella). 1961; with additional selections as "The Misfits" and Other Stories, 1987.
Jane's Blanket (for children). 1963.
Homely Girl, A Life. 1992; as Plain Girl: A Life, 1995.
Short Stories
I Don't Need You Anymore. 1967.
"The Misfits" and Other Stories. 1987.
Other
Situation Normal (reportage on the army). 1944.
In Russia, with photographs by Inge Morath. 1969.
In the Country, with photographs by Morath. 1977.
The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller, edited by Robert A. Martin. 1978; revised edition, 1996.
Chinese Encounters, with photographs by Morath. 1979.
Salesman in Beijing, with photographs by Morath. 1984.
Timebends: A Life (autobiography). 1987.
Inge Morath: Portraits, with others. 1999.
Mr. Peters' Connections. 1999.
Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1947-1999, edited by S. Centola. 2000.
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Film Adaptations:
All My Sons, 1948, 1987; Death of a Salesman, 1951, 1985; The Crucible (also known as The Witches of Salem ), 1958, 1996; A View from the Bridge, 1962; The Price, 1969; After the Fall, 1969; Playing for Time, 1980; Focus, 2001.
Critical Studies:
Arthur Miller: Dramatist by Edward Murray, 1967; Arthur Miller: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Robert W. Corrigan, 1969; Psychology and Arthur Miller by Richard Evans, 1969; Arthur Miller: Portrait of a Playwright by Benjamin Nelson, 1970; Arthur Miller by S. K. Bhatia, 1985; Conversations with Arthur Miller, edited by Matthew Charles Roudane, 1987; Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman" and Arthur Miller's "The Crucible," both by Harold Bloom, both 1996; Arthur Miller by Neil Carson, 1982; Arthur Miller in Conversation by Steve Centola, 1993; The Achievement of Arthur Miller: New Essays, edited by Steve Centola, 1995; Understanding Arthur Miller by Alice Griffin, 1996.
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Arthur Miller, the dean of American playwrights, was born 17 October 1915 in New York City. He grew up in Harlem and Brooklyn, a product of the Great Depression in America and of World War II, and was hailed as one of the century's greatest playwrights when Death of a Salesman triumphantly premiered on Broadway in 1949. Miller critically and artistically has from the beginning of his career been linked to the works of Henrik Ibsen. Like Ibsen, Miller has long been obsessed with the notion of individual and collective guilt, of the relationship of the individual to society, and of the necessity of moral action, even at the cost of one's physical destruction.
While all his plays question public and private guilt and innocence, Miller only directly addresses the Holocaust in four works, from his middle and late periods. In the earliest of these, his autobiographical play After the Fall, the watchtower of a concentration camp hovers over the entire action of the play, a looming shadow over the life and consciousness of the protagonist Quentin that cannot be dismissed. Following such earlier plays as All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible, where people were asked, ordered, pressured, and even threatened by their community's social structures to deny, repudiate, or corrupt their individual identities and their moral sense, this looming shadow metaphorically creates an even greater resonance, especially as Miller has frequently been critically attacked for seeming to forsake his Jewish identity in his earlier plays.
Incident at Vichy, re-creating the southern French community that shamefully rounded up its Jewish population in willful collaboration with its German occupiers, presents a panoply of Jewish characters robbed of any agency or voice, desperately seeking any answers or repudiation of the inescapable yet unbelievable horrors that await them. Playing for Time, a critically acclaimed television adaptation of the memoirs of survivor Fania Fenelon , plunges the viewer into the physical and moral abyss of the camps. Here Miller acknowledges that survival was accomplished less by one's character than by chance and that, without a voice or an ability to affect an action, the moral obligation comes from the act of remembering the past. His last Holocaust play, Broken Glass, though generally well received, is a less successful and frankly problematic play about a middle-aged Jewish-American woman's obsession in 1938 with the virulent anti-Semitism sweeping Germany, an obsession that culminates in her becoming physically paralyzed by the news. As in such early plays as Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, here the issue surrounds the denial of identity, specifically that of her husband's Jewishness as a successful executive in a WASP Wall Street firm. Here the obviousness of Sylvia's symbolic paralysis detracts from rather than illuminates the drama Miller has constructed as Sylvia ultimately overcomes her paralysis as her husband approaches his own death. Yet seriously flawed as Broken Glass may be, Miller's consistent and passionate advocacy for the individual's need and responsibility to connect and to remain connected to the world remains bracingly intact.
Miller's troubled and troubling examinations of mid to late twentieth-century American life and its responses to the Holocaust have brought up and continue to engage with many of the issues that we are grappling with in the early years of the new millennium. If the Holocaust has forever cast humanity as either victims, perpetrators, or bystanders, then Miller's concentration on them and how they respond to the central moral issues of our day becomes essential reading and performing.
—Steven Dedalus Burch
See the essay on Incident at Vichy.
