Arthur Miller

1915 – 2005

In the period immediately following the end of World War II, American theater was transformed by the work of playwright Arthur Miller. Miller combined in his works social awareness with deep insights into personal weaknesses of his characters'. Miller's plays continued the realistic tradition that began in the United States in the period between the two world wars.

Arthur Miller was born in New York in the family of a Brooklyn Jew commercial who came from Poland and was ruined in the depression. The sudden change in fortune had a strong influence on Miller. Miller spent his boyhood playing football and baseball, reading adventure stories, and appearing generally as a nonintellectual. He went to grammar school in Harlem and high school in Brooklyn. Miller never did well in school. After graduating from a high school in 1932, Miller worked in automobile parts warehouse to earn money for college. Having read Dostoevsky's novel “The Brothers Karamazov” Miller decided to become a writer. To study journalism he entered the University of Michigan in 1934, where he won awards for playwriting - one of the other awarded playwrights was Tennessee Williams.

After graduating in 1938, Miller returned to New York. There he joined the Federal Theatre Project, and wrote scripts for radio programs, such as Columbia Workshop (CBS) and Cavalcade of America (NBC). Because of a football injury, he was exempt[5] from draft[6]. In 1940 Miller married a Catholic girl, Mary Slattery, his college sweetheart, with whom he had two children.

During World War II Miller published a series of sketches about American Army “Situation Normal”. In 1944 his first play “The Man Who Had All the Luck” was published appeared on Broadway. A story is about an incredibly successful man who is unhappy with that success. In this play Miller showed a moral dignity of a man, the behaviour and psychology of a personality in society. It closed after four performances.

Miller’s first public success was with “Focus” (1945), a novel about anti-Semitism. Fame came in 1947 with the play “All My Sons” which was about a factory owner who sells faulty aircraft parts during World War II. Concerned with morality in the face of desperation, "All My Sons" appealed to a nation having recently gone through both a war and a depression. It won the New York Drama Critics Circle award and two Tony Awards. In 1944 Miller toured Army camps to collect background material for the screenplay “The Story of Gi Joe” (1945).

“Death of a Salesman” (1949) brought Miller international fame, and become one of the major achievements of modern American theatre. It relates the tragic story of a salesman named Willy Loman, whose past and present are mingled in expressionistic scenes. Winning both a Pulitzer Prize and a Drama Critics Circle Award, the play ran for more than seven hundred performances. Within a short while, it had been translated into over a dozen languages and had made its author a millionaire.

In 1949 Miller was named an "Outstanding Father of the Year", which manifested his success as a famous writer. But the wheel of fortune was going down. In the 1950s Miller was subjected to a scrutiny[7] by a committee of the United States Congress investigating Communist influence in the arts. The FBI read his play “The Hook”, about a militant[8] union organizer, and he was denied a passport to attend the Brussels premiere of his play “The Crucible” (1953). It was based on court records and historical personages of the Salem witch trials of 1692. This play, which received Antoinette Perry Award, was an allegory for the McCarthy era and mass hysteria. In the play he expressed his faith in the ability of an individual to resist conformist pressures. Although its first Broadway production flopped[9], it became one of Miller's most-produced plays.

Two short plays under the collective title “A View from the Bridge” were successfully produced in 1955. In 1956 Miller was awarded honorary degree at the University of Michigan but also called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Miller admitted that he had attended certain meetings, but denied that he was a Communist. He had attended among others four or five writers' meetings sponsored by the Communist Party in 1947, supported a Peace Conference at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, and signed many appeals and protests.

Miller married Marilyn Monroe in 1956; they divorced in 1961. At that time Marilyn was beyond saving. She died in 1962. In the late 1950s Miller wrote nothing for the theatre. His screenplay “Misfits” (1961) was written with a role for his wife. The film was directed by John Huston, starring Mongomery Clift, Clark Gable, and Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn was always late getting to the set and used heavily drugs. The marriage was already breaking, and Miller was feeling lonely. Miller's last play, “Finishing the Picture”, produced in 2004, depicted the making of “Misfits”.

Miller was politically active throughout his life. In 1965 he was elected president of P.E.N., the international literary organization. At the 1968 Democratic Party Convention he was a delegate for Eugene McCarthy. In 1964 Miller returned to stage after a nine-year absence with the play “After the Fall”, a strongly autobiographical work, which dealt with the questions of guilt and innocence. Many critics consider that Maggie, the self-destructive central character, was modelled on Monroe, though Miller denied this. A year after his divorce, Miller married the Austrian photographer Inge Morath (1923-2002), with whom he co-operated on two books about China and Russia. After Inge Morath died, Miller planned to marry Agnes Barley, a 34-year-old artist.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote very little of note, concentrating at first on issues of guilt over the Holocaust, and later moving into comedies. “The Archbishop’s Ceiling” published in 1977 deals with the Soviet treatment of dissident writers. In 1987 he published his autobiography “Timebends”. In the 1990s Miller wrote such plays as “The Ride down Mount Morgan” (1991) and “The Last Yankee” (1993). Both plays returned to the themes of success and failure that he had dealt with in earlier works. Concerning himself with the American dream, and the average American's pursuit of it, Miller recognized a link between the poverty of the 1920s and the wealth of the 1980s. Encouraged by the success of these works, a number of his earlier pieces returned to the stage for revival performances.

In 2002 Miller was honored with Spain's prestigious Principe de Asturias Prize for Literature, making him the first U.S. recipient[10] of the award. Miller died of heart failure at home in Roxbury, Connecticut, on February 10, 2005.

“The Price” (1968) is an exploration of the theme of guilt and responsibility. In this play Miller tells about two brothers, Victor and Walter, who met after a long separation. The plot builds around the sale of furniture, which left after the death of their father in an old house, which now is to be scrapped. But the main thing in the play is a reconsideration of the ways the brothers have chosen. A younger, Victor, in his youth took upon himself all cares of his father. Out of pity and love to his father he sacrificed his future of a scientist, gave up a university and became a policeman. The elder brother, Walter, built his own career. Their ways parted. Now, when the brothers meet again after many years of alienation, they try to understand what has separated them and to appreciate their deeds.

Walter, having become a prosperous surgeon, an owner of first-rate clinics and profitable houses for aged people, finds strength to break with the past and to return to people, to his noble vocation of a doctor. It becomes clear that Victor’s sacrifice was vain. He could continue his studying at the university. The father didn’t need Victor to doom on an unloved job for he had money. So, Victor destroyed himself senselessly, refused his vocation in vain.

In essence, both brothers made a mistake. Having read the play, one can make a conclusion that life is too complex for somebody can say exactly: where is good, where is evil, who is right, who is wrong.

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