Arthur Miller Totally Explained

Everything about Arthur Miller totally explained

Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright and essayist. He was a prominent figure in American literature and cinema for over 61 years, writing a wide variety of plays, including celebrated plays such as The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, All My Sons, and Death of a Salesman, which are still studied and performed worldwide. Miller was often in the public eye, most famously for refusing to give evidence against others to the House Un-American Activities Committee, being the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama among other awards, and for marrying Marilyn Monroe. At the time of his death, Miller was considered one of the greatest American playwrights.

Biography

Early life

Arthur Miller was born to moderately affluent Jewish-American parents, Isidore and Augusta Miller, in Manhattan, New York City, in 1915. His father owned a women's clothes/coat-manufacturing business, which failed in the Wall Street Crash of 1929 after which his family moved to humbler quarters in Brooklyn.
Because of the effects of the Great Depression on his family, Miller had no money for college after graduating in 1932 from Abraham Lincoln High School (New York). After winning the Avery Hopwood Award for No Villain, Miller switched his major to English, where he met Professor Kenneth Rowe, who aided Miller in his early forays into playwrighting. Miller retained strong ties to his alma mater throughout the rest of his life, establishing the university's Arthur Miller Award in 1985 and Arthur Miller Award for Dramatic Writing in 1999, and lending his name to the Arthur Miller Theatre in 2000. In 1937, Miller wrote Honors at Dawn, which also received the Avery Hopwood Award. The couple had two children, Jane and Robert. Robert became a director, writer and producer whose was, among other things, producer of the 1996 movie version of The Crucible.
Miller was exempted from military service during World War II because of a high-school football injury to his left kneecap. Despite this critical success, the play closed after only six performances. and two Tony Awards in 1947, despite Miller receiving criticism for being a Communist. and a Pulitzer Prize, and ran for seven hundred and forty-two performances. After speaking with Kazan about his testimony Miller traveled to Salem, Massachusetts to research the witch trials of 1692. opened at the Beck Theatre on Broadway on January 22 1953. Though widely considered unsuccessful at the time of its initial release, today The Crucible is one of Miller's most frequently produced works. When Miller attended the hearing, to which Monroe accompanied him, risking her own career,. The couple remained together until Inge's death in 2002. Arthur Miller's son-in-law, actor Daniel Day-Lewis is said to have visited Daniel frequently, and to have persuaded Arthur Miller to reunite with his adult son .

Later career

In 1964 Miller's next play was produced. After the Fall is a deeply personal view of Miller's own experiences during his marriage to Monroe. The play reunited Miller with his former friend Kazan: they collaborated on both the script and the direction. After the Fall opened on January 23 1964 at the ANTA Theatre in Washington Square Park amid a flurry of publicity and outrage at putting a Monroe-like character, called Maggie, on stage. During this period Miller wrote the penetrating family drama, The Price, produced in 1968.
In 1969, Miller's works were banned in the Soviet Union after he campaigned for the freedom of dissident writers. In late 1987, Miller's autobiography, Timebends was published. Before his autobiography was published, it was well known that that Miller wouldn't talk about Monroe in interviews; in Timebends Miller talks about his experiences with Monroe in detail. On May 1 2002, Miller was awarded Spain's Principe de Asturias Prize for Literature as "the undisputed master of modern drama." Previous winners include Doris Lessing, Günter Grass and Carlos Fuentes. Later that year, Ingeborg Morath died of Lymphatic cancer at the age of 78. The following year Miller won the Jerusalem Prize. on the evening of February 10 2005 (the 56th anniversary of the Broadway debut of Death of a Salesman) at the age of 89, surrounded by his family.

Legacy

Miller's career as a writer spanned over seven decades, and at the time of his death in 2005, Miller was considered to be one of the greatest dramatists of the twentieth century, among the likes of Harold Pinter, Eugene O'Neill, Luigi Pirandello, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertolt Brecht, and Tennessee Williams. some calling him the last great practitioner of the American stage, and Broadway theaters darkened their lights in a show of respect. Miller's alma mater, the University of Michigan opened the Arthur Miller Theatre in March, 2007. Per his express wish, it's the only theater in the world that bears Miller's name.
Miller's friend Professor Christopher Bigsby is currently working on Arthur Miller: The Definitive Biography, based on boxes of papers Miller made available to him before his death in 2005. The book will be published in November 2008, and is reported to reveal unpublished works in which Miller "bitterly attack[ed] the injustices of American racism long before it was taken up by the civil rights movement".

Works

Fiction

No Villain (play, 1936)
They Too Arise (play, 1937, based on No Villain)
Honors at Dawn (play, 1938, based on They Too Arise)
The Grass Still Grows (play, 1938, based on They Too Arise)
The Great Disobedience (play, 1938)
Listen My Children (play, with Norman Rosten, 1939)
The Golden Years (play, 1940)
The Man Who Had All the Luck (play, 1940)(External Link)
The Pussycat and the Plumber Who Was a Man (radio play, 1941)
William Ireland’s Confession (radio play, 1941)
Jed Chandler Harris (radio play, 1941)
Captain Paul (radio play, 1941)
The Battle of the Ovens (radio play, 1942)
Thunder from the Mountains (radio play, 1942)
I Was Married in Bataan (radio play, 1942)
Toward a Farther Star (radio play, 1942)
The Eagle’s Nest (radio play, 1942)
The Four Freedoms (radio play, 1942)
The Half-Bridge (play, 1943)
That They May Win (radio play, 1943)
Listen for the Sound of Wings (radio play, 1943)
Bernardine (radio play, 1944)
I Love You (radio play, 1944)
Grandpa and the Statue (radio play, 1944)
The Philippines Never Surrendered (radio play, 1944)
The Guardsman (radio play, 1944, based on Ferenc Molnár’s play)
Pride and Prejudice (radio play, 1944, based on Jane Austen’s novel)
The Story of G.I. Joe (film, 1943)
Focus (novel, 1945)
Three Men on a Horse (radio play, 1946, based on George Abbott and John C Holm play)
All My Sons (play, 1947)
The Story of Gus (radio play, 1947)
The Hook (film, 1947)
Death of a Salesman (play, 1949)
An Enemy of the People (play, 1950, based on Henrik Ibsen play An Enemy of the People)
The Crucible (play, 1953)
A View from the Bridge (play, 1955)
A Memory of Two Mondays (play, 1955)
The Misfits (short story, 1957)
The Misfits (screenplay, 1961)
After the Fall (play, 1964)
Incident at Vichy (play, 1964)
I Don’t Need You Anymore (short stories, 1967)
The Price (play, 1968)
Fame (television play, 1970)
The Reason Why (radio play, 1970)
The Creation of the World and Other Business (play, 1972)
The Archbishop's Ceiling (play, 1977)
The American Clock (play, 1980)
Playing for Time (television play, 1980)
Elegy for a Lady (short play, 1982, first part of Two Way Mirror)
Some Kind of Love Story (short play, 1982, second part of Two Way Mirror)
Everybody Wins (screenplay, 1984)
Playing for Time (stage version, 1985)
I Think About You a Great Deal (play, 1986)
I Can’t Remember Anything (play, 1987, also known as )
Clara (play, 1987, also known as Danger: Memory)
The Last Yankee (play, 1991)
The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (play, 1991)
Homely Girl (short story, 1992, published UK as Plain Girl: A Life 1995)
Broken Glass (play, 1994)
The Crucible (screenplay, 1995)
Mr Peter’s Connections (play, 1998)
Resurrection Blues (play, 2002)
Finishing the Picture (play, 2004) (Source: Martin Gottfried's Arthur Miller: A Life, Da Capo Press 2003, except for the final entry.)

Non-fiction works

Situation Normal (1944) is based on his experiences researching the war correspondence of Ernie Pyle.

In Russia (1969), the first of three books created with his photographer wife Inge Morath, offers Miller's impressions of Russia and Russian society.

In the Country (1977), with photographs by Morath and text by Miller, provides insight into how Miller spent his time in Roxbury, Connecticut and profiles of his various neighbors.

Chinese Encounters (1979) is a travel journal with photographs by Morath. It depicts the Chinese society in the state of flux which followed the end of the Cultural Revolution. Miller discusses the hardships of many writers, professors, and artists as they try to regain the sense of freedom and place they lost during Mao Zedong's regime.

Salesman in Beijing (1984) details Miller's experiences with the 1983 Beijing People's Theatre production of Death of a Salesman. He describes the idiosyncrasies, misunderstandings, and insights encountered in directing a Chinese cast in a decidedly American play.

Timebends: A Life, Methuen London (1987) ISBN 0413414809. Like Death of a Salesman, the book follows the structure of memory itself, each passage linked to and triggered by the one before.

Collected works

Kushner, Tony, ed. Arthur Miller, Collected Plays 1944-1961 (Library of America, 2006) ISBN 978-1-93108291-4.

Martin, Robert A. (ed.), "The theater essays of Arthur Miller", foreword by Arthur Miller. NY: Viking Press, 1978 ISBN 0140049037.

Steven R Centola, ed. Echoes Down the Corridor: Arthur Miller, Collected Essays 1944-2000, Viking Penguin (US)/Methuen (UK), 2000 ISBN 0413756904Further Information

Get more info on 'Arthur Miller'.

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