Arthur Miller

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For the cinematographer, see Arthur C. Miller

Image:Arthur miller.JPG Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright, essayist and author. He was a prominent figure in American literature and cinema for over 61 years, writing a wide variety of plays. Miller's best-known works were The Crucible, All My Sons (which won the 1947 Tony Award for best play), and Death of a Salesman, which are still widely studied and performed worldwide. He was also known for his marriage to Marilyn Monroe (1956-1961), who converted to Judaism for him. Miller's marriage to Monroe lasted longer than either of her two previous marriages: four years and seven months. By contrast, her marriage to Joe DiMaggio lasted only nine months.

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Biography

Miller was born into a moderately-wealthy Jewish family in New York City. His father, Isidore Miller, was a ladies-wear manufacturer and shopkeeper who was ruined in the Great Depression. His mother was a housewife. His sister, Joan became an actress known as Joan Copeland and has appeared in some of her brother's plays.

Miller attended P.S. 24 in Harlem from 1920 to 1928, and saw his first play (a melodrama) in 1923 at the Shubert Theatre. At Abraham Lincoln High School near Coney Island, in Brooklyn, New York, Miller was a talented athlete and mediocre student. He was first rejected by the University of Michigan and suffered a great deal of anti-Semitism, which would influence his later works. Miller put $13 of every $15 pay check he earned into a college fund and reapplied to the University of Michigan, where he was accepted in 1934.

At Michigan, Miller first majored in journalism and then switched to English, becoming particularly interested in ancient Greek drama and the dramas of Henrik Ibsen. During spring break in 1936 (his sophomore year), he wrote his first work, No Villain (reportedly because of a contest offering a $250 prize), which won the Avery Hopwood Award, the first of two he received. Miller retained strong ties to his alma mater throughout the rest of his life, establishing the Arthur Miller Award in 1985 and Arthur Miller Award for Dramatic Writing in 1999, and lending his name to the Arthur Miller Theatre in the forthcoming year. In 1938, Miller received his bachelor's degree in English. In 1940, he married his college sweetheart, Mary Slattery (with whom he had two children, Jane and Robert). He was exempted from military service during World War II because of a football injury. Miller was a high school football star but injured his left kneecap while being tackled.

Miller rose to prominence with All My Sons in 1947, which was about a factory owner who sells faulty aircraft parts during World War II. All My Sons won the New York Drama Critics Circle award and two Tony Awards. His 1949 play Death of a Salesman won the Pulitzer Prize and three Tony Awards, as well as the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. It was the first play ever to win all three.

Deeply troubled by the Red Scare fomented by Senator Joseph McCarthy, Miller adapted Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People," which was produced in 1950. As the situation grew worse, he went to Salem, Massachusetts to study the witch trials of 1692. The work he produced, The Crucible, opened on Broadway on January 22, 1953. It is Miller's most frequently produced work. In 1956, he divorced his wife, Mary Slattery. In June of the same year, he appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and at the end of the month on June 29, he married Marilyn Monroe, whom he had met eight years earlier through director Elia Kazan. Monroe converted to Judaism .

On May 31, 1957, Miller was found guilty of contempt of Congress for refusing to reveal the names of members of a literary circle suspected of Communist affiliation. His conviction was reversed August 7, 1958, by the U.S. Court of Appeals. The same year, he published Collected Plays.

On January 24, 1961, Monroe was granted a divorce from Miller. A year later, Miller wed Inge Morath on February 17, 1962. They had met when she and other photographers from the Magnum Photos agency documented the making of The Misfits 1961. The Misfits turned out to be the final film appearence for both Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe. Miller and Morath had two children, Daniel and Rebecca, and were married 40 years until her death in 2002. Rebecca Miller is a screenwriter, actor and director.

An excellent obituary for Miller appeared in the New York Times: obituary[1] of February 11, 2005.

Miller was one of the original founders of International PEN's Writers in Prison committee, and in 1965 was elected the organization's president, a position he held for four years [2], [3].

In 1985, Miller visited Turkey and was honored at the American embassy. After his traveling companion Harold Pinter was thrown out of the country for discussing torture, Miller left in support.

On January 30, 2002, Inge Morath died. On May 1 the same year, Miller was awarded Spain's Principe de Asturias Prize for Literature as "the undisputed master of modern drama". Previous winners include Doris Lessing, Günter Grass and Carlos Fuentes. The following year Miller won the Jerusalem Prize.

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