Two dramas, both from the 20th Century, have entered the American zeitgeist so much that their plots and characters are familiar to people who have never seen or read the plays. I’m talking about The Crucible, a 1953 play ostensibly about the Salem Witch Trials and allegorically about the McCarthyism era in the US. And also about Death of a Salesman, a 1949 play about Willy Loman, a traveling salesman. Both plays are considered to be among the best of that century, and both were written by Arthur Miller. Miller was born October 17, 1915, in New York City.
When Miller was a boy, his family was prosperous, had a summer house, and employed their own chauffeur (and must have owned an automobile, which was a luxury item in that era). But when Miller was about 14, the family lost everything in the Wall Street Crash of 1929. They moved to a less expensive part of the city, and Miller soon got a job delivering bread to help the family’s expenses.
He attended the University of Michigan, and worked at various jobs to pay his tuition. He graduated with a degree in English, and won an award for the first play he ever wrote, No Villain. That evidently gave him the idea of becoming a playwright, and he enrolled in a playwriting seminar. The professor, Kenneth Rowe, encouraged Miller and became his friend.
Miller graduated in 1938, when the Great Depression was still in effect and government agencies had been created to provide jobs. He joined the Federal Theatre Project, even though 20th Century Fox offered him a better-paying job as a movie scriptwriter. When the project ended in 1939, Miller continued to avoid Hollywood and got a manual-labor job in a shipyard while he wrote radio plays. Some of his radio plays were produced and broadcast, although no recordings were made.
Miller married in 1940, and was ineligible for military service during World War II because of a serious knee injury he’d sustained as a teenager. His first live commercial play, The Man Who Had All the Luck, was produced in 1944. It won the Theatre Guild’s National Award, but was not a success and closed after just four performances.
His first successful play, which earned him a Tony Award for Best Author, was All My Sons. It was produced on Broadway in 1947, and was quite popular in spite of being, in one critic’s review, “a very depressing play in a time of great optimism.”
In 1948, Miller was a newly successful playwright with a growing reputation, and he built a small studio outside New York City, in Connecticut. That’s where he wrote Death of a Salesman. It premiered on Broadway in 1949, and Miller won more awards: another Tony Award, the New York Drama Circle Critic’s Award, and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was the first time one play had garnered all three awards, and it was was presented for over 700 performances.
Some of Miller’s friends, including the director Elia Kazan, were called to testify by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1952. This was at the peak of McCarthyism, a paranoid hunt for “communists” inspired by corrupt demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy. It was HUAC that inspired Miller to visit Salem, Massachusetts and research the witch trials held there in 1692. He wrote The Crucible, which was first performed in 1953. It wasn’t as successful as Death of a Salesman, but ever since it’s been Miller’s most-produced play worldwide. HUAC retaliated by denying Miller a passport to attend the play’s opening in London in 1954. In 1957, the committee fined Miller, blacklisted him from Hollywood, and sentenced him to prison. He appealed in the courts and won. The experience stayed with him, and later he wrote at least one play (Some Kind of Love Story) about individuals persecuted by governments, and became an activist for people in similar situations.
Miller was a celebrity from the late 1940s until the early 1960s, and was in all the tabloid newspapers in 1956 — not because of his plays, and not because of his run-in with HUAC. It was because he married Marilyn Monroe, probably the biggest movie star of the era. The marriage was reportedly unhappy, and the couple divorced in 1961.
Miller is still considered one of the greatest dramatists of the 20th Century, and when he died at 89 in 2005 (on February 10, the anniversary of the premier of Death of a Salesman), there were tributes from around the world. All the lights on Broadway were darkened in tribute. The University of Michigan opened the Arthur Miller Theatre in 2007, which is the only theater that bears his name — which was a specific request he made in his will. There is an Arthur Miller Foundation in New York, and a bit further away, the minor planet 3769 Arthurmiller bears his name. It’s somewhere in the inner asteroid belt, if you’re planning a visit. Miller’s letters, drafts, and other papers are at the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas.
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