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Drama
Arthur Miller
 Arthur Miller was born in Harlem, New York in 1915 to a prosperous family of Eastern
European Jewish descent. His adolescence in New York, his family's economic
decline, and his ethnicity are important, and he discusses them at length
in interviews, essays, and Timebends, his 1987 autobiography. These
same factors inform many of his most important plays as well. In an interview
with Christopher Bigsby published in Arthur Miller and Company (1990),
for example, Miller describes the Harlem of his youth as a "very pleasant
place to be," at the time "one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in New
York." This pre-Depression era Harlem was happily multicultural, a neighborhood
where Blacks from the rural South, Irish, Italian, German, and Eastern European
immigrants lived together. He remembers these times, before he moved to Brooklyn
at age 12, much as the former residents of small towns remember their early
years.
Miller's move to Brooklyn in the
later 1920s triggers similarly happy memories. He recalls playing ball in
large open fields—"Brooklyn was then far less crowded than it later became
and we called it the country"—and fishing in the Atlantic Ocean. Like many
recently arrived families (Miller's father had come to America as a small
boy from Austro-Hungary and his mother, whose father had immigrated from Poland,
was born in America), the Millers were engaged in a process that in Timebends
Miller calls a gradual metamorphosis. The "desire to move on. . . was given
me as life's inevitable and rightful condition."
Regrettably, two factors intervened
to intrude upon this heretofore happy transformation: the Great Depression,
precipitated by the Stock Market Crash of 1929, and evidence of anti-Semitism.
Both of these matters, along with the metamorphosis of Brooklyn from "small
town country" to an overcrowded city, also influenced Miller's plays. His
family, by his own description, was ruined by the Depression and very quickly
declined from prosperity to an indigence. A manufacturer of women's coats,
Miller's father Isidore lost both his capital and "a perfectly viable business."
By the fall of 1932, as Miller recounts in Timebends, it "was no longer
possible in our house to disguise our fears. Producing even the fifty-dollar-a-month
mortgage payment was becoming a strain". About this time, Miller, while
watching other kids play, met an older boy, a college student, who stopped
and explained to the teenager the implications of the country's economic collapse.
There existed "two classes of people in society," the young man observed,
"the workers and the employers." The former were exploited by the latter,
and "a revolution that would transform every country was inexorably building
up steam." At the time, with the country in the throes of the Depression,
such a utopian dream struck Miller and many other Americans as highly desirable.
Later in 1956, the year in which
he announced his engagement to film star Marilyn Monroe, Miller would be asked
to recount his attraction to Marxist ideology by the House Committee on Un-American
Activities. Having written The Crucible in 1953, an allegory of the
Cold War Communist witch-hunts perpetuated by Senator Joseph McCarthy and
like-minded politicians, Miller frankly recalled his association with leftists
during the 30s and 40s, although he refused to name others who had participated.
(Several of his closest theatrical friends and collaborators, for example,
worked with the Group Theatre in the 1930s, a company known both for its revolutionary
acting techniques and its political ideology.)
While many at the time and Miller himself
regarded him as a radical, more recent critics like David Savran view him
as falling more tamely within the ideological parameters of American individualism,
as much indebted to Ralph Waldo Emerson as to Karl Marx. Nonetheless, it
is clear that Miller's politics at the time fell left of center. The anonymous
college student who had given him the impromptu lecture decades before had
exerted his influence. The basic conception of a more just economic scheme
to replace a failed capitalism—and of individual responsibility in the face
of difficult ethical predicaments—reverberates throughout his plays, especially
such earlier works as All My Sons and Death of a Salesman.
As Miller recalls, the rise of
fascism and, more specifically, anti-Semitism, exerted its effect as well.
After graduating from high school, for example, Miller was required to find
work and found it in an auto parts warehouse. Going for an interview on Long
Island, however, he initially returned to Brooklyn without the position.
His employer at the time explained to him that he didn't get the new job because
he was a Jew and, after a phone call, he was informed that he had gotten the
job after all. Anti-Semitism is the subject of his early novel Focus
(1945), and later in his career he has represented the horrors of Nazism and
the Holocaust in such works as his teleplay Playing for Time (1980)
and Broken Glass (1994). The politics of oppression are not limited
only to instances of anti-Semitism and not merely the subjects for his writing,
as Miller and other writers representing International PEN—an organization
of writers that advocates for such rights as freedom of expression—have interceded
when writers were threatened by governmental or other threats. He and Harold
Pinter, for example, traveled to Turkey in 1985 to investigate allegations
that Turkish writers had been imprisoned and tortured. Both writers also
protested the death proclamation made by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini against
Salman Rushdie after the publication of Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses.
After working some three years
in New York as a young man, Miller eventually enrolled at and graduated from
the University of Michigan, where he won two successive Avery Hopwood Awards
for his plays, one of which (No Villain) was revised and won the Theatre
Guild Award in 1938, earning its author $1250. Interestingly enough, although
he had seen several plays as a teenager in New York—Ibsen's Ghosts
and Clifford Odets' agit-prop drama Waiting for Lefty—he was not immediately
drawn to play-writing. At Michigan, he began by writing short stories and
eventually came to regard the theater as an arena in which literature and
political action might merge. Upon graduating in 1938, Miller joined the
playwriting division of the Federal Theatre, a government-sponsored program
during the Depression to support unemployed actors, writers, and other theatrical
artisans. There, he continued writing and honed his craft, and also supported
himself by writing radio plays.
Miller certainly came of age during
the 1940s, achieving celebrity with the production of All My Sons in
1947 and the success of his Pulitzer-Prize winning play, Death of a Salesman.
All was not perfect, however, and the road to public acclaim was not always
an easy one. Miller's 1944 play The Man Who Had All the Luck closed
on Broadway after only four performances and would remain a hidden theatrical
treasure for over half a century. In 1944, this "well-meant botch," Miller's
description of the failed production, actually tempted him to abandon drama:
"I would never write another play," he recalled in Timebends. Yet
in 2000, the fledgling company Antaeus produced the play in Los Angeles with
considerable success; and in 2002 The Man Who Had All the Luck returned
to the Broadway stage starring film actor Chris O'Donnell. Reviewing the
2002 production, critic Gerald Rabkin termed the play "the worthy initiation
of a distinguished, consciously moral dramatic journey." The traveler, of
course, is Miller himself, who in a remarkable career spanning nearly sixty
years has become a pillar of the American—and world—theater. Today, his plays
continue to be produced, and Miller continues to write. With his wife Ingeborg
Morath, Miller has authored several travel books, including an account of
the production of Death of a Salesman in China.
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Selected Bibliography of Miller's Work
Selected Dramatic Works
Honors at Dawn (1936; first play produced as student)
No Villain (1938)
The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944; reprised in 2000 and 2002)
All My Sons (1947)
Death of a Salesman (1949)
An Enemy of the People adapted from Ibsen, 1950)
The Crucible (1953)
A Memory of Two Mondays (1955)
A View from the Bridge (1955)
After the Fall (1964)
Incident at Vichy (1964)
The Price (1968)
The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972)
The American Clock (1980)
The Archbishop's Ceiling (1984)
Two-Way Mirror (1989)
The Ride Down Mount Morgan (1991)
The Last Yankee (1993)
Broken Glass (1994)
Screenplays
The Misfits (1957, 1961)
Playing for Time (teleplay, 1980)
Everybody Wins, later Almost Everybody Wins (1983; 1995)
Selected Prose
Situation Normal (non-fiction prose, 1944)
Focus (novel, 1945)
Jane's Blanket (children's literature, 1963)
I Don't Need You Anymore (1967, short stories)
Timebends : A Life (autobiography, 1987)
Homely Girl, A Life and Other Stories (1995)
The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller (rev. ed., 1995)
Echoes Down the Corridor (essays, 2000)
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Further Reading About Miller's Work
Abbotson, Susan C. W. Student Companion to Arthur Miller. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.
Bigsby, Christopher. Modern American Drama, 1945-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.
_______________, ed. Arthur Miller and Company. London: Methuen, 1990.
_______________, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Arthur Miller. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
______________. Willy Loman. New York: Chelsea House, 1990.
Centola, Steven R., ed. The Achievement of Arthur Miller: New Essays. Dallas: Contemporary Research, 1995.
Corrigan, Robert W., ed. Arthur Miller: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969.
Griffin, Alice. Understanding Arthur Miller. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1996.
Murphy, Brenda. Miller: Death of a Salesman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.
Roudané, Matthew C., ed. Approaches to Teaching Miller's Death of a Salesman. New York: Modern Language Association, 1995.
____________________. Conversations with Arthur Miller. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987.
Savran, David. Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. m Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992.
Schlueter, June, and James K. Flanagan. Arthur Miller. New York: Ungar, 1987.
Williams, Raymond. Drama From Ibsen to Brecht. London: Chatto & Windus, 1952.
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