Arthur Miller, one of America's greatest playwrights, who has died aged 89, was an active and prolific writer across seven decades. In Death Of A Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953), he created two of the century's most durable dramatic myths, and, in Timebends (1987), one of its outstanding autobiographies. He walked his own life into the glare of living myth when, at the height of her fame in 1956, he married Marilyn Monroe.
Miller was born in Harlem, New York. Both Jewish grandfathers came from the same hamlet in Poland; his father Isidore - lzzie - had been dispatched alone from Radomizi to relatives in New York at the age of six and became a prince of the Manhattan rag trade. Ruined in the depression, he had had the good sense to marry the sassy and beautiful Augusta Barnett (Gussie), who was much smarter than him.
Arthur was closer to his mother, but tender to the memory of both parents, and their spirit, ambition and disappointments are present in most of the plays. He once said that everything he had written was based on somebody he had seen or known, and although Death Of A Salesman is not strictly autobiographical, it is hard to imagine without the lives of Izzie and Gussie Miller.
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The Millers left Harlem for Brooklyn in the early 1920s. Arthur, their second son and middle child, was proceeding normally through an American suburban boyhood - baseball, skating, crooning, football - when Wall Street crashed. He was 14. This first great discord of the American century informs all his work. Like Dickens and Ibsen, he drew from his father's financial disaster the lifelong convictions that catastrophe could strike without warning and that the crust of civilised order was perilously thin. Miller would later pour scorn on the sentimental myth of the American depression as a golden age of good neighbourliness - "Everybody was your friend? Horseshit! Nobody was your friend!"
In 1934 he went to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he became a student journalist, wrote his first play, No Villain, and three more with the kind of grand, resonant titles which reflect the gathering global melodrama of the time: They Too Arise, Honors At Dawn, and The Great Disobedience. He won a $1, 250 prize from the Bureau of New Plays run by the New York producers, the Theater Guild. Tennessee Williams - four years his senior - won a New Plays Prize in the same year.
Miller's graduation in 1938 coincided with a rare moment of generous state funding for the arts in the US, and he joined the Federal Theater Project (FTP) at $22.77 per week. Set up in 1935 by Roosevelt's work-creation programme, the FTP's purpose was to provide jobs for the unemployed of the theatre industry. Congress killed it off in 1939, believing it to have become too left-wing; but in its short life the Federal Theater played to more than 12 million people in New York City alone, allowed Orson Welles and John Houseman to fly the pirate flag of disobedience with The Cradle Will Rock, produced The Swing Mikado, and bought a little time for the ambitious young Arthur Miller.
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In 1940, Miller finished The Golden Years, a drama of confrontation between Cortez and Montezuma. The script, mislaid by Theater Guild, turned up many years later at the University of Texas and was premiered in Britain, on BBC's Radio Three in 1987. Today, it reads like a cross between a Hollywood costume epic and an opera libretto in translation; but the subject of genocide in 16th-century Mexico laid down a pattern in Miller's career, whereby he often chose to write about the horrors of the 20th century at one remove. The real stories behind The Golden Years were the bombing of Guernica and the appeasement of fascism.
A college football injury kept him from active service in the second world war. He worked on an army training film, wrote for the radio, drove a truck, published a novel about anti-semitism and became a fitter at Brooklyn navy yard. Miller was the kind of writer on whom no experience was wasted: just as the navy yard turned up years later in A View From The Bridge (1955), so a nightmare visit to see Václav Havel in 1969, in the wake of the Prague Spring, inspired one of Miller's most tensely wound later plays, The Archbishop's Ceiling (1977).
He made Broadway at last in 1944, with The Man Who Had All The Luck, a hubristically named fable which closed after four performances. The play is significant, however, because it is Miller's first attempt to mix the disciplines of suburban tragedy, folkish realism and ironic farce. It draws on a gorgeous inheritance of Brooklyn family and neighbourhood stories and flags up a theme which recurs throughout his work: personal honour.
Death Of A Salesman: Amazon.ca: Dustin Hoffman, Kate Reid, Jon Polito, Kathryn Rossetter, John Malkovich, Arthur Miller, Volker Schlöndorff, Stephen Lang, Michael Ballhaus, Charles Durning, Louis Zorich, David S. Chandler, Christian Blackwood,
By the end of the second world war, Arthur Miller had written many kinds of theatre out of his system, and could figure the mood of the time to some purpose. What would America's peace be like? His answer was a play that can still deliver an emotional knock-out, and became his first hit. Opening at the Coronet Theatre on January 29, 1947, directed by Elia Kazan, and starring Ed Begley, Beth Merrill, Karl Malden and Arthur Kennedy, All My Sons ran for 328 performances - a good length for an unfamiliar playwright, and one he rarely surpassed.
This was a new Broadway, and All My Sons was a watershed show. Eighteen months after the euphoria of V-J Day, audiences were ready for what is a back-from-the-war play. A family tale of corrupt profiteering at home that led to the death of US pilots abroad, it exploded in the pause between victory and the attempted press-ganging of show business for Washington's cold war. From this point on, Miller's best scenes display a mastery of conversation, a gift for sketching vivid characters on the margins of a play, and a narrative talent for seizing the spectator's attention from the start.
The Broadway theatre of the 1940s and 1950s, in which Miller and Tennessee Williams made their name, was something of a public tribune, led by spectacular performers, directors, artists and writers: Kazan, Eugene O'Neill, William Inge, the designer Jo Mielziner, actors such as Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy and Lee J Cobb. The tribune was graced by the golden age of the American musical which ran alongside it, and attended by a highly responsive press. Subtitled Certain Private Conversations In Two Acts And A Requiem, Death Of A Salesman opened at the Morosco Theatre on February 10, 1949, and played for 742 performances: it was the biggest success of Miller's career and has recently enjoyed a revival on Broadway which is due to transfer to London in May.
Designing Arthur Miller: Simple Gestures, Big Ideas
Sales rep, husband and father, "way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine", Willy Loman is a slave to the US ideals of pitching, hard work and equal opportunity, driven by the disciplines of exemplary manliness in the home and the need to keep up appearances outside it. Like Williams's Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire - the two plays are contemporaneous - Willy freefalls through American society by following its false dreams. He destroys his sons with great expectations, and is working himself to death.
If you met Willy Loman going on about his boys in a hotel bar out on the road, you would make for the door within minutes. The strength of the play is that Miller makes this exasperating dumbness precisely the reason why the economic injustice against him is so great. After two decades of depression and two world wars, the nation was still not respecting his own. A man whose insurance policy makes him worth more dead than alive, does what Hamlet only talks of doing, and walks into the air. It is a shameful, culpably American suicide, and the play asks two questions. What is "America"? And what should America be?
The questions are asked, too, in All My Sons (1947), The Crucible (1953) and A View From The Bridge (1955). Talking to Eric Hobsbawm later in life, Miller identified two paradoxes that make the US so volatile and contradictory. In the land where the individual is king, society rules supreme. In a nation of immigrants, the "alien" is necessary and forever being redefined - the subject of A View From The Bridge. "Once you've accepted the idea that orthodoxy is required", he said, "you have to go through the Inquisition".
Judith Ann Bennett Arthur
By 1949, a new inquisition had indeed detected a new heresy - the enemy within - and sniffed a pandemic of Marxism on the wind. Joy in victory was rapidly tarnished by the paranoia of McCarthyism. The House Un-American Activities Committee was hijacked by the hard right, and one of its first tasks would be to disinfect the Augean stables of showbiz.
Miller's integrity was tested like steel. There was never a blacklist on Broadway like those in Hollywood and Washington, but many of his old
By the end of the second world war, Arthur Miller had written many kinds of theatre out of his system, and could figure the mood of the time to some purpose. What would America's peace be like? His answer was a play that can still deliver an emotional knock-out, and became his first hit. Opening at the Coronet Theatre on January 29, 1947, directed by Elia Kazan, and starring Ed Begley, Beth Merrill, Karl Malden and Arthur Kennedy, All My Sons ran for 328 performances - a good length for an unfamiliar playwright, and one he rarely surpassed.
This was a new Broadway, and All My Sons was a watershed show. Eighteen months after the euphoria of V-J Day, audiences were ready for what is a back-from-the-war play. A family tale of corrupt profiteering at home that led to the death of US pilots abroad, it exploded in the pause between victory and the attempted press-ganging of show business for Washington's cold war. From this point on, Miller's best scenes display a mastery of conversation, a gift for sketching vivid characters on the margins of a play, and a narrative talent for seizing the spectator's attention from the start.
The Broadway theatre of the 1940s and 1950s, in which Miller and Tennessee Williams made their name, was something of a public tribune, led by spectacular performers, directors, artists and writers: Kazan, Eugene O'Neill, William Inge, the designer Jo Mielziner, actors such as Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy and Lee J Cobb. The tribune was graced by the golden age of the American musical which ran alongside it, and attended by a highly responsive press. Subtitled Certain Private Conversations In Two Acts And A Requiem, Death Of A Salesman opened at the Morosco Theatre on February 10, 1949, and played for 742 performances: it was the biggest success of Miller's career and has recently enjoyed a revival on Broadway which is due to transfer to London in May.
Designing Arthur Miller: Simple Gestures, Big Ideas
Sales rep, husband and father, "way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine", Willy Loman is a slave to the US ideals of pitching, hard work and equal opportunity, driven by the disciplines of exemplary manliness in the home and the need to keep up appearances outside it. Like Williams's Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire - the two plays are contemporaneous - Willy freefalls through American society by following its false dreams. He destroys his sons with great expectations, and is working himself to death.
If you met Willy Loman going on about his boys in a hotel bar out on the road, you would make for the door within minutes. The strength of the play is that Miller makes this exasperating dumbness precisely the reason why the economic injustice against him is so great. After two decades of depression and two world wars, the nation was still not respecting his own. A man whose insurance policy makes him worth more dead than alive, does what Hamlet only talks of doing, and walks into the air. It is a shameful, culpably American suicide, and the play asks two questions. What is "America"? And what should America be?
The questions are asked, too, in All My Sons (1947), The Crucible (1953) and A View From The Bridge (1955). Talking to Eric Hobsbawm later in life, Miller identified two paradoxes that make the US so volatile and contradictory. In the land where the individual is king, society rules supreme. In a nation of immigrants, the "alien" is necessary and forever being redefined - the subject of A View From The Bridge. "Once you've accepted the idea that orthodoxy is required", he said, "you have to go through the Inquisition".
Judith Ann Bennett Arthur
By 1949, a new inquisition had indeed detected a new heresy - the enemy within - and sniffed a pandemic of Marxism on the wind. Joy in victory was rapidly tarnished by the paranoia of McCarthyism. The House Un-American Activities Committee was hijacked by the hard right, and one of its first tasks would be to disinfect the Augean stables of showbiz.
Miller's integrity was tested like steel. There was never a blacklist on Broadway like those in Hollywood and Washington, but many of his old
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