Arthur Miller Biography
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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 60
years, writing a wide variety of plays. Miller's best-known works were
The Crucible and Death of a Salesman, which are still widely studied and
performed. He was also known for his short-lived marriage to Marilyn
Monroe, who converted to Judaism for him.
****
Biography
Miller was born to moderately wealthy
Jewish immigrants in New York. His father was a women's clothing
manufacturer. His mother was a housewife and schoolteacher. He had a
brother and a sister, Kermit Miller and Joan Miller, Joan became an
actress known as Joan Copeland and has appeared in some of her brother's
plays. His family was forced to move to Harlem.
Miller attended P.S. 24 in Harlem from 1920
to 1928, and saw his first play (a melodrama) in 1923 at the Schubert
Theatre. At Abraham Lincoln High School near Coney Island, in Brooklyn,
New York, Miller was a talented athlete and mediocre student. He was
rejected by both the University of Michigan and the Cornell University.
After graduating, he read works of Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky
and worked at a car parts warehouse. There Miller experienced a great
deal of anti-Semitism, which would influence his later works (especially
A Memory of Two Mondays). Miller put $13 of every $15 paycheck he earned
into a college fund and reapplied to the University of Michigan, where
he was accepted in 1934.
At Michigan, Miller studied journalism and
drama, 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 he won). The play centered around a
strike and the main character's inability to express himself, and won an
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 Walgreen Drama Center. The University also
honored its distinguished alumnus with an honorary Doctor of Humane
Letters degree in 1956 and several tributes and symposia on his frequent
returns to Ann Arbor.
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's 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. His
next play, The Crucible, opened on Broadway on January 22, 1953. In
1956, he divorced his wife. In June of the same year, he appeared before
the House Un-American Activities Committee, having been named by Elia
Kazan as having attended Communist Party meetings, and at the end of the
month on June 29, he married Marilyn Monroe, whom he had met eight years
earlier through Kazan. Monroe converted to Judaism for the marriage.
On May 31st, 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 8, 1958, by the U.S. Court of Appeals. The same year, he
published Collected Plays.
On January 24, 1961, Monroe was granted a
divorce two months after Miller left her for Inge Morath, whom he
married on February 17, 1962. They had met when she and other
photographers from the Magnum Photos agency documented the making of The
Misfits. They had two children, Rebecca, born that September, and
Daniel. According to biographer Martin Gottfried, Daniel was born with
Down Syndrome. Miller placed Daniel in an institution in Roxbury,
Connecticut, and never visited him. Miller doesn't mention Daniel in
Timebends, his 1987 autobiography, and the issue was ignored in the New
York Times obituary[1] of February 11, 2005 (though it was reported in
the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere). Rebecca Miller is a screenwriter,
actor and director.
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.
In December 2004, the 89 year old Miller
announced that he had been living with 34 year old artist Agnes Barley
since 2002, and they were planning to marry. Within hours of his death,
Barley had moved out of his house on orders of Miller's daughter
Rebecca, who disapproved of the relationship.
Works
Plays
Honors at Dawn (1935)
No Villain: They Too Arise (1937)
The Golden Years (1940, first performed
1990)
The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944)
All My Sons (1947)
Death of a Salesman (1949)
The Crucible (1953)
A Memory of Two Mondays (1955)
A View from the Bridge (1955)
After the Fall (1964)
Incident at Vichy (1965)
The Price (1968)
The Creation of the World and Other
Business (1972)
The Archbishop's Ceiling (1977)
The American Clock (1981)
Elegy For a Lady (1982)
Some Kind of Love Story (1982)
Danger: Memory!: Two Plays (I Can't
Remember Anything and Clara) (1986)
The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991)
The Last Yankee (1993)
Broken Glass (1994)
Mr. Peters' Connections (1998)
The Ryan Interview (2000)
Resurrection Blues (2002)
Finishing the Picture (2004)
Screenplays
The Misfits (IMDB) (1961)
An Enemy of the People (IMDB – adaptation
of Henrik Ibsen's play) (1966)
Playing for Time (IMDB -- for TV) (1980)
Everybody Wins (IMDB) (1989)
Other works
(1944)Situation Normal
(1945) Focus
Fame
I Don't Need You Any More
The Reason Why
Homely Girl, a Life: And Other Stories
The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller
Timebends: A Life
****
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URL of Original Article:
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Date Article Copied:
September 15, 2005
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