Arthur Miller

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Arthur Miller
P L A Y B I L L
Baruch College
One of Americas most prominent and respected
authors and playwrights.
8.17.1915 - 2.10.2005
If I have any justification for having lived,
it's simply, I'm nothing but faults, failures and
so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of
shoes. There's some value in that.
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Who He Was

• Born in New York (1915) to a poor Jewish family
  eventually ruined by the Great Depression.
• Spent his childhood as a normal kid, playing
  sports, reading books, and also reading the
  Hearst newspapers.
• After having read Dostoevskys The Brothers
  Karamazov, he decided to become a writer.
• He matriculated at U Michigan in 1934 to study
  journalism. He won awards for playwriting during
  his four years there.

Miller - The man who had all the luck."
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Who He Was (Continued)

• After graduating Michigan, Miller returned to New
  York and joined the Federal Theater Project,
  writing scripts for radio programs. He was exempt
  from the draft because of a football injury.
• He married his college sweetheart and his first
  Broadway show closed after four shows.
• In 1947, he produced All My Sons, one of his most
  famous works about a factory owner who sells
  faulty aircraft parts during World War II. It won
  two Tony Awards. Miller was obviously influenced
  by the War in writing this novel. He even
  collected background material from visits to Army
  camps in 1944 for the screenplay of another one
  of his plays (The Story of GI Joe), and wrote
  about anti-Semitism in another play (Focus).

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Who He Was (Continued)

• In 1949, he became internationally famous with
  Death of a Salesman. The play relates the tragic
  story of a salesman, Willy Loman, whose life is
  eventually ruined because of the postwar economic
  boom, causing him to commit suicide.
• However, in the 1950s, Miller was suspected of
  being a communist. Although he had attended a few
  meetings sponsored by the Communist Party in the
  early 40s, he was not a communist.
• This influenced him to write his most
  recognizable and reprinted works, The Crucible a
  play about the persecution of witches in Salem,
  MA, in the 1690s, which stood as an allegory for
  the 1950s. Millers real life experiences can be
  seen as almost exactly the same as the
  protagonists in the novel.
• In 1956, he married Marilyn Monroe. They divorced
  in 1961.

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Who He Was (Continued)

• Miller remained politically active throughout his
  life and was even a delegate for Eugene McCarthy.
  However, in his later years he still kept writing
  more plays.
• In the 1990s, Miller noted that it was
  increasingly hard to be a playwright because it
  was becoming harder and harder to obtain new
  actors. He claimed that all of the good ones were
  attracted to the high salaries offered to them
  through television or film.
• Miller died of heart failure at his home in
  Connecticut on February 10, 2005.

A play is made by sensing how the forces in life
simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed
irony, the deadly joke. --Arthur Miller
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His Works Influences

• Miller was influenced by the physical,
  historical, political, and social environments
  around him.
• Through his works, one can see inspiration from
  his poor upbringings as a child of the
  Depression, an American during the postwar boom
  of the 1950s, and a citizen of the US suspected
  of communism during the Cold War.

It is also important to note that his plays often
depict how families are destroyed by false
values. Additionally, Miller combined in his
works social awareness with deep insights into
the personal weaknesses of his characters.
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