Arthur Miller Biography

One of the best playwrights born in the USA, Arthur Miller has gifted us with his remarkable creations. He went to win a Pulitzer with one of his plays named ‘Death of a Salesman’. Born in 1905, Arthur was a skilled playwright who mesmerized the world with his creations. He is known for his marvellous skills of setting a play in the contemporary domains appealing to the audience to its deepest core. This critically-acclaimed playwright attracted a lot of praise from the world of plays during that time. To this date, his plays are acted and shown at the international level.

This Arthur Miller biography will focus light on his life, his achievements, social life and will give us insights into the plays he wrote that brought him immense fame. He was one rebellious playwright who did not even think twice to show his ideologies to the rest of the world.

Arthur Miller: The playwright the world worships

Arthur was a brilliant student at the University of Michigan. He moved to the east and started writing dramas. He achieved an international reputation with his creation ‘Death of a Salesman’ after winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1949. He also won multiple Tony Awards during his career. Arthur Miller work is considered to be a remarkable platform depicting the contemporary world’s conditions.

During his lifetime, he witnessed the horror of World Wars but did not leave the passion of writing dramas. He did a few jobs that did not suit his aim. Even though he belonged to an affluent Polish family, he had to suffer bankruptcy due to the market crash back in 1929.

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Image of Famous Playwright Arthur Miller

The Early Life of Arthur Miller

Arthur was born on 17th October 1915 in Harlem, New York. His family was from Poland. They migrated to America and started a successfully established business. The family manufactured coats. He was raised by his mother Augusta who was an avid educator. She liked to read novels a lot and eventually admired Arthur to grow this habit. Isidore Miller, his father, was successfully handling the coat manufacturing business in New York while his mother took care of his education.  

The affluent family suffered a lot when the Wall Street Crash occurred in 1929. The entire family had to leave New York and move to Flatbush in Brooklyn from Manhattan. He completed his high school education there and then started to work in different jobs to support his family. He also managed to save money for his college education. He then left his job and attended the University of Michigan to attend college.

His first creation ‘No Villain’ was for the student paper published in the college. His brilliance started to reflect at a very young age. He even went to win the Avery Hopwood Award for his first play. He realized his passion and wanted to become more capable in playwriting. Arthur took courses regarding learning how to write better plays under the supervision of Professor Kenneth Rowe. It is Rowe who influenced him to move back East to start a career in playwriting.

Arthur’s Career and Awards

His first play brought him a lot of admiration but his professional play named ‘The Man Who Had All the Luck’ did not go well as expected. This drama was shown on Broadway in 1944 but did receive antithesis reviews. It went for four shows as it attracted a lot of negative reviews from the audience. Despite the woeful reviews, he did not turn his back on his passion. He kept on creating plays and eventually shot to fame.

As per his Arthur Miller life and works, he continued to write plays. His next publish was ‘Focus’, a novel based on anti-Semitism in the year 1945. Right after two years, he created a play named ‘All My Sons’ in 1947. It was a huge hit and went on capturing the Broadway stage for an entire year. This play put Arthur on the international platform of fame and brought the first Tony Award. He won the Best Author for his exceptional creation that influenced him to create better work in his career.

He worked in a small studio he owned in Roxbury, Connecticut. It was there where he wrote the first act. It was his immortal creation name ‘Death of a Salesman’ in a single day. This play was directed by Elia Kazan and was first performed at the Morosco Theater on 10th February 1949. Everyone in the audience was delighted by the performance, the screenplay, and the direction of this marvellous play. This play started to gain immense attention from the world of drama and became an iconic creation of that time.

This drama is based on the travels and toil of a man named Willy Loman. He was an ageing Brooklyn salesman with a declining career. This man finds that the values he pursued throughout his career were nothing but unsubstantial things that do not matter. He was in his sixties realizing that his hard work has eradicated his smile, happiness, and heartiness. The famous critic Brook Atkinson described this brilliant play remarkably with the fate of a salesman who worked so hard but lost all his positive emotions and eventually lost hope.

This play has been written so beautifully that it brought him the highest accolades in the world of theatre. He bagged the Pulitzer Prize, The Tony’s Award for the Best Play, and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. In fact, this play swept all the categories clean in the Tony’s Award.

He then created a play named ‘The Crucible’ in 1953 that depicted the witch trials conducted back in 1692. It also had a hidden depiction of McCarthyism that brought him under the scanner of the House of Un-American Activities Committee.

Later in his career, he explored the personal and societal issues that influenced the American psyche. He was unable to draw attention from his work on the contemporary American psyche, unlike his previous acclamations.  

On 10th February 2005, Miller died in Roxbury at the age of 89. Arthur Miller cause of death was heart failure.

Arthur Miller autobiography: Timebends

He also wrote an autobiography in the year 1987. Based on his life ‘Timebends’ was the depiction of his ideologies and thoughts. He explained his expectations with life so well that this autobiography quickly gained attention among the readers. He depicted that his young self imagined writing a marvellous play and amazing the entire world is somewhat similar to a doctor’s deed of saving lives.

His autobiography also depicts the events of his life chronologically. Readers can walk through his life with his beautiful description of the then world. His friendships, marriages, families, and theatrical career are so nicely described. His autobiography is far from conventional autobiographies the world is accustomed to reading. Arthur Miller awards suggest how intelligent he was in the sphere of American classic plays.

This Arthur Miller biography suggests how life was for him. His acclamation as a celebrated American playwright is what the admirers and playwrights across the world follow. He is an inspiration in terms of his playwright career but his personal life was spotted by unfortunate events.