All My Sons | Author Biography

Arthur Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in New York City. He spent his early years in comfortable circumstances, until his father, Isidore, a prosperous manufacturer, lost his wealth in the economic devastation of the Great Depression. After completing high school, Miller had to take a job in a Manhattan warehouse.

He had not been much of a student, but after reading Dostoevsky's great novel The Brothers Karamazov, he decided that he was destined to become a writer. He had trouble getting into college but was eventually accepted at the University of Michigan, where he began his apprenticeship as a writer and won several student awards for his work.

Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller at his writing desk.

After college he returned to New York and worked briefly as a radio script writer, then tried his hand at writing for the stage commercially. His first Broadway play, The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), closed after only four performances, but it did win a Theater Guild award and revealed the young writer's potential.

He had more success with Focus (1945), a novel dealing with anti-Semitism. In fact, at the time he wrote All My Sons (1947), his first dramatic hit, he was better known as a writer of fiction than as a playwright.

All My Sons established Miller's standing as a bright and extremely talented dramatist. The play had a good run and won Miller his first New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. Even the least favorable commentators recognized the playwright's great promise.

Miller followed All My Sons with three of his most critically and commercially successful plays: Death of Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), and A View from the Bridge (1955). In these works, Miller attempted to show that tragedy could be written about ordinary people struggling to maintain personal dignity at critical moments in their lives. With these plays, Miller joined Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams in what in the post-World War II years was generally recognized as the great triumvirate of the American theater.

Miller, a political leftist, gained some notoriety in the 1950s when he refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee and was held in contempt of Congress. From this experience he found thematic material for one of his most famous and controversial plays, The Crucible, which focuses on the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.

After the 1955 production of A View from the Bridge, Miller took a nine-year hiatus from playwriting. In the interim, Miller married and divorced the famous actress, Marilyn Monroe. He did adapt one of his stories, The Misfits, as a screen vehicle for his celebrated wife but did not complete another Broadway play until 1964, when both After the Fall and Incident at Vichy were produced. The former play, considered Miller's most experimental play, is also his darkest work, with many autobiographical parallels.

His last Broadway success was The Price, produced in 1968. After his next play, The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), failed on Broadway, Miller stopped premiering works in New York. He continued to write plays, and enjoyed some success, but nothing that matched that of his earliest works. Many of his later plays were short one-act plays and works comprised of sketches or vignettes.

His greatest triumphs remain Death of a Salesman and The Crucible. Both have been revived with great success. In 1999, for example, the New York production of Death of a Salesman garnered four Tony awards, including one for best revival and one for best direction. At the age of eighty-four, Miller was also presented with a special, lifetime achievement award for his great contributions to the American theater. Miller died from congestive heart failure on February 10, 2005, in Roxbury, Connecticut.