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Arthur was born In October 17, 1915 and Harlem, New York. -
Arthur Miller graduates from Brooklyn's Abraham Lincoln High School and begins work in an auto-parts warehouse in order to save money for college. He also attends New York City College night classes for a few weeks, but drops out when he is unable to keep up with both school and work.
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The stock market crashes. Isidore Miller, who has invested extensively in stocks, takes a hard hit in the subsequent Depression. Within two years, Miller is forced to give up his business and the family moves from Manhattan to Brooklyn. -
Miller enrolls in the University of Michigan after having been denied admission twice before due to his poor grades in high school. Miller works as a reporter and night editor for the university newspaper, the Michigan Daily.
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After graduating Miller he joined the Federal Theatre Project, writing radio plays.
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Arthur gets married to his college sweetheart, her name was Mary Grace Slattery. -
Miller worked as a ship fitter's helper at the Brooklyn Navy yard while writing radio plays and he was collecting dialect for the library of congress.
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Miller finds work as a screenwriter for a war film, The Story of G.I. Joe, and quits his job in the Navy Yard. Frustrated with his employers and their lack of acknowledgement for his work, Miller eventually quits the job.
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Miller's play The Man Who Had All the Luck receives the Theater Guild National Award and opens on Broadway. Despite the award, the play bombs with the public and closes after only four performances. Disheartened with his repeated failures in New York, Miller considers quitting writing. In the same year Mary Slattery gives birth to the couple's first child, a daughter named Jane.
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Miller's play All My Sons, based on a true story about a man who sold faulty machine parts to the U.S. military during World War II, becomes an instant hit.
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Miller meets actress Marilyn Monroe and they have a brief affair.
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The play's setting in the Salem Witch Trials provides an allegory for Senator Joseph McCarthy's ongoing persecution of suspected communists, a process that disgusts Miller. -
Miller divorces his first wife and marries Marilyn Monroe. Shortly after the marriage, Miller—who has attended party meetings, but never been a member of the Communist party—is called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities to testify. -
A judge finds Miller guilty of contempt of Congress for refusing to name other alleged communists during his 1956 HUAC testimony. -
After a lengthy appeals trial, a judge overturns Miller's contempt conviction.
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Miller marries Austrian-born photographer Inge Morath, whom he met on the set of The Misfits. In September, Morath gives birth to their daughter Rebecca. -
Miller writes Incident at Vichy and After the Fall, two plays about the Holocaust. Critics assail After the Fall, calling it indulgent and exploitative of Marilyn Monroe's recent death. Miller denies any intentional similarity between the play's character and his former wife.
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Miller is elected president of PEN, an international literary organization that advocates for a free press and against censorship and oppression of writers.
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Miller's son Daniel is born with Down Syndrome and his parents decide to commit him to an institution.
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After receiving lackluster reviews at its 1977 American premiere, The Archbishop's Ceiling opens to great acclaim in England and marks the beginning of a revival of Miller's work in that country. The play's themes reflect Miller's advocacy on behalf of censored writers in the Soviet bloc.
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Miller publishes his autobiography, Timebends. He also releases two plays, I Can't Remember Anything and Clara, both preoccupied with the themes of memory and remembrance.
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Miller's The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, a distinctly political play about the Reagan years, premieres in England.
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nge Morath, Miller's wife of forty years, dies of lymphatic cancer. -
Arthur Miller dies at the age of 89 at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut.