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Birthdate
Arthur Asher Miller born in October 17, 1915 in New York City, NY to Jewish immigrant parents. He was the second of three children. -
Early Years
By 1929, the family had moved to Brooklyn after his father’s business was lost and the family faced financial hardships. Witnessing the societal decay of the Depression and his father’s desperation due to business failures had an enormous effect on Miller. -
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The Great Depression
During this period time, Millers family was affected tremendously. His family lost everything and his father went bankrupt. Miller was influenced by the Depression and his way of thinking. It gave him a sense of understanding life exposed to many social hypocrisies and changed the way success and failure could be considered. -
University of Michigan
After graduating from high school, he started working a few jobs to save up money for college. In 1934 he enrolled in University of Michigan. -
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College Years
While studying at University of Michigan he spent much of the next four years learning to write and worked on a number of well-received plays. He wrote for the student paper and completed his first play, No Villain, for which he won the school's Avery Hopwood Award. He earned his bachelor of arts degree. -
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World War ll and Red Scare
Arthur Miller's play, All My Sons is a play about a family dealing with the loss of a son and a hidden family shame after World War II. Miller’s inspiration for All My Sons stemmed from a true-life story told to him by stepmother as well as his personal experiences in life. The story and his personal experiences with the Red Scare in the late 1940’ s-1950 have brought him to understand coping mechanisms dealing with loss, shame, and guilt in times of war. -
Fist Wife
Miller married his college sweetheart Mary Grace Slattery. -
The Man Who Had All the Luck
His first Broadway, The Man Who Had All the Luck, was produced in 1944. Although it lasted only four performances, the play nevertheless won a Theater Guild award. -
First Child
Miller and Slattery had their first born child Jane Ellen Miler. -
Focus
After graduating, he worked as a freelance writer in New York. Miller published a novel about anti-Semitism, called Focus, his first public success. -
All My Sons
In 1947, Miller's play All My Sons, (a tragedy about a manufacturer who sells faulty parts to the military in order to save his business. Concerned with morality in the face of desperation, “All My Sons” appealed to a nation having recently gone through both a war and a depression) was a success on Broadway earning him his first Tony Award, for Best Author and his reputation as a playwright was established. -
Second Child- Robert
Miller and Slattery had their second child named Robert. -
Death of Salesman
After his success in "All My Sons", his success grew more with the Broadway premiere of Death of a Salesman directed by Kazan. It ran for 742 performances and won the Tony Award for Best Play, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. -
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McCarthyism
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s America was overwhelmed with concerns about the threat of communism growing. Joseph McCarthy a young senator had made public accusations that more than two hundred “card-carrying” communists had infiltrated the United States government. McCarthy’s accusations heightened the political tensions known as McCarthyism, the paranoid hunt for infiltrators was notoriously difficult on well-known writers and entertainers such as Charlie Chaplin, Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan. -
Tony Award
The production of The Crucible won the 1953 Tony Award for Best Play. A year later a new production succeeded and the play became a classic. -
The Crucible
Miller based The Crucible on the witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692–93, a series of persecutions that he considered an echo of the McCarthyism of his day, when investigations of alleged subversive activities were widespread. -
Married Marilyn Monroe
In 1956, Miller divorced his first wife, Mary Slattery, his former college sweetheart. He later married actress and Hollywood Marilyn Monroe. -
Fun Facts
Author Norman Mailer called their marriage the union of "The Great American Brain" and "The Great American Body." -
HUAC
The same year he married MM, Miller was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and convicted of contempt of Congress for not cooperating. Miller refused to comply with the committee's demands to "out" people who had been active in certain political activities and was thus cited in contempt of Congress. Miller was fined 500, sentenced to 30 days in prison. -
Overturn Conviction
In 1958, his conviction was overturned on the grounds that the questions he had been asked to answer served no legislative purpose. The Crucible, was an allegory about McCarthyism, was believed to be one of the reasons why Miller came under the committee's scrutiny. -
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Later Career
Miller's other plays include A View From the Bridge, Incident at Vichy ( the round-up of Jews in Vichy France during World War II), The Price, The Creation of the World and Other Business, The American Clock (a series of dramatic vignettes based on Studs Terkel’s Hard Times about the Great Depression). -
The Misfits
During this time, Miller wrote a screenplay adaption of his short story “The Misfits” to give Monroe the opportunity to play a serious role, but the film was unsuccessful. -
Divorced MM
Around the same time as The Misfits release, Monroe and Miller divorced. -
Rebecca Miller
Miller and Morath's first child, Rebecca, was born in September 1962. -
Death of MM
Monroe died the following year, and Miller's controversial 1964 drama "After the Fall" was believed to have been partially inspired by their relationship, after being highly criticized Miller denied it. -
Remarried
In 1962, Miller married photographer Inge Morath and the couple collaborated on several photo-journalistic projects. Miller and Morath live happily for the next forty years, both of them with important careers that they occasionally merged to produce several books of photographs and reportage including In Russia, In the Country, Chinese Encounters, and Salesman in Beijing. -
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Pres. of PEN
From 1965 to 1969, he served as the President of PEN, an international organization of playwrights, poets, essayists, and novelists formed after World War II to combat censorship and repression of writers. -
Daniel Miller
The couple's second child Daniel was born in 1966 with Down syndrome and was institutionalized shortly after his birth. -
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A New Change
During the 1970s and 1980s, he experimented with several different forms. While addressing real issues using real people in real situations, he strove to incorporate new techniques into his overall design to keep his plays fresh, exciting to produce and watch. -
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Free Playwright Augusto
During the 1970s, he helped free the Brazilian playwright Augusto Boal from prison, appeared on a panel before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to support the freedom of writers throughout the world, and petitioned Czechoslovakia to halt arrests of dissident writers. -
Autobiography
In 1987, Miller published his autobiography Timebends: A Life. -
PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award
He was honored with the PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award for a Master American Dramatist in 1998 -
Praemium Imperiale Prize
In 2001 Miller received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for theatre/film. -
Death of his wife
In 2002, Miller's third wife, Morath, died. -
Death of Miller
Miller died of heart failure at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, surrounded by Barley, family and friends. He was 89 years old. -
The Arthur Miller Foundation
The Arthur Miller Foundation was founded to honor the legacy of Miller and his New York City Public School education. Its mission is "Promoting increased access and equity to theater arts education in our schools and increasing the number of students receiving theater arts education as an integral part of their academic curriculum." -
Documentary
In March 2018, HBO aired the documentary Arthur Miller: Writer. Directed and narrated by his daughter Rebecca, the piece chronicled the life of the great American playwright, from the creation of his iconic plays, to his marriage to Monroe to his relationships with family members.