Miller, Arthur (redirected from Arthur Miller)

Miller, Arthur, 1915–2005, American dramatist, b. New York City, grad. Univ. of Michigan, 1938. One of America's most distinguished playwrights, he has been hailed as the finest realist of the 20th-century stage. Miller's plays are, above all, concerned with morality as they reflect the individual's response to the manifold pressures exerted by the forces of family and society. Recurring themes of his major works involve the overwhelming importance of personal and social responsibility and the moral corruption that results from betraying the dictates of conscience.

Miller's masterpiece, Death of a Salesman (1949; Pulitzer Prize), is the story of a salesman betrayed by his own hollow values and those of American society. The Crucible (1953) is both a dynamic dramatization of the 17th-century Salem witch trials and a parable about the United States in the McCarthy era (see McCarthy, Joseph Raymond); it has been his most frequently produced work. In A View from the Bridge (1955; Pulitzer Prize) Miller studies a Sicilian-American longshoreman whose unacknowledged lust for his niece destroys him and his family. Miller's tumultuous life with his second wife, Marilyn Monroe, to whom he was married from 1956 to 1961, is fictionalized in his After the Fall (1964), and a barely disguised version of the glamorous but troubled actress also appears in his last play, Finishing the Picture (2004).

Miller's other plays include The Man Who Had All the Luck (1940), All My Sons (1947), Incident at Vichy (1965), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), The American Clock (1980), The Ride down Mount Morgan (1991), Broken Glass (1994), and Resurrection Blues (2002). He also wrote the screenplay for The Misfits (1961); the television dramas Playing for Time (1980) and Clara (1991); a novel, Focus (1945); and a book of short stories (1967) Miller's The Theater Essays (1971, rev. ed. 1996) is a collection of writings about the craft of playwriting and the nature of modern tragedy, and Echoes down the Corridor (2000) is a collection of essays (1944–2000), many of them autobiographical. He collaborated with his third wife, the photographer Inge Morath (1923–2002), on several books; their In Russia (1969) is a study of the Soviet Union.

Bibliography

See his autobiography, Timebends (1987); M. C. Roudane, Conversations with Arthur Miller (1987), S. Centola, Arthur Millar in Conversation (1993), M. Gussow, Conversations with Miller (2002); biography by M. Gottfried (2003); studies by B. Nelson (1970), R. Hayman (1972), J. J. Martine, ed. (1979), D. Welland (1979, repr. 1985), L. Moss (rev. ed. 1980), H. Bloom, ed. (1987), J. Schlueter and J. K. Flanagan (1987), N. Carson (1988), P. Singh (1990), S. R. Centola, ed. (1995), A. Griffin (1996), T. Otten (2002), C. Bigsby (2004), and E. Brater, ed. (2005).

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Miller, Arthur

Arthur Miller, photograph by Inge Morath

(credit: Magnum)

(born Oct. 17, 1915, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Feb. 10, 2005, Roxbury, Conn.) U.S. playwright. He began writing plays while a student at the University of Michigan. His first important play, All My Sons (1947), was followed by his most famous work, Death of a Salesman (1949, Pulitzer Prize), the tragedy of a man destroyed by false values that are in large part the values of his society. Noted for combining social awareness with a searching concern for his characters' inner lives, Miller wrote many other plays, including The Crucible (1953), which uses a plot about the Salem witch trials to attack McCarthyism, A View from the Bridge (1955), After the Fall (1964), The Last Yankee (1992), and Resurrection Blues (2002). He also wrote short stories, essays, and the screenplay for The Misfits (1961), which starred his second wife, Marilyn Monroe.

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Miller, Arthur (1915–  ) playwright; born in New York City. He graduated from the University of Michigan (1938), where he won a prize for playwrighting. After serving in the U.S. Army in World War II, he enjoyed his first success with a novel, Focus (1945). His first play, The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), was a flop, but All My Sons (1947) won the New York Drama Critic Circle Award. Two years later, Death of a Salesman won both the Drama Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize; the play, considered his most enduring work and an American classic, depicts the corrosive effects of self-deception on an ordinary man and his family. An Enemy of the People (1950) was a new translation of the Ibsen play. The Crucible (1953) told of the witch trials in Salem and was seen as a metaphor for his views on contemporary McCarthyite Red-baiting. Later plays include A View from the Bridge (1955) and After the Fall (1964), widely assumed to be based on his marriage to Marilyn Monroe (1956–60). He wrote an original screenplay, The Misfits (1961), which starred Monroe. His later works, including The American Clock (1980), met with little enthusiasm in the U.S.A., but he continued to enjoy a wide following in England and his plays are done in translations throughout the world.