Arthur Miller: A Life in Five Chapters

Chapter 1 · 1929

A father's business, and a warehouse job to pay for college

1915 – 1938 · Harlem · Brooklyn · Michigan

Arthur Asher Miller was born in Harlem on 17 October 1915. His father Isidore had arrived from Poland as a child, could not read or write, and built a coat manufacturing business employing hundreds of people. The family had a chauffeur and a large apartment overlooking Central Park.

The Wall Street Crash destroyed it. The business collapsed, the family moved to a small house in Brooklyn, and Miller delivered bread before school. He said afterwards that the Depression was the formative event of his life — not the poverty itself but watching a confident man become bewildered, and seeing that a whole system of promises could simply stop being true.

His father's condition after the crash is behind Willy Loman: a man who believed the arrangement was that if you were well liked and worked hard, you would be all right, and who could not understand why it had not happened.

Miller's school grades were poor and he was rejected by the University of Michigan twice before being admitted on a promise to work hard. He paid his way by working in an automobile parts warehouse and, at Michigan, won student playwriting prizes that came with money — the first evidence that he could do it.

He graduated in 1938, worked briefly for the Federal Theatre Project until Congress cut its funding, and wrote radio plays.

His first Broadway play, *The Man Who Had All the Luck*, opened in 1944 and closed after four performances. He decided to give himself one more attempt before finding another profession.

Why this matters

Miller's central subject — a man destroyed by believing a promise his society had stopped keeping — comes directly from watching his father after 1929.

You have the Depression household. What would you ask him?

Ask Miller

• “What did the Crash do to your father?”
• “How did you pay for university?”
• “What did the Depression teach you about promises?”
• “What did you learn from a play that closed in four nights?”
• “Why did you give yourself only one more try?”

Chapter 2 · Death of a Salesman

Attention must be paid

1947 – 1949 · New York · Connecticut

*All My Sons* (1947) came first: a manufacturer who knowingly shipped defective aircraft parts, causing pilots' deaths, and let his business partner take the blame. It was based on a real wartime case, ran for over three hundred performances, and won Miller a Tony Award.

He then built a small studio at his house in Connecticut and wrote the first act of *Death of a Salesman* in a day and a night. The whole play took about six weeks.

Willy Loman is sixty-three, has been a travelling salesman for decades, is being paid on commission alone, and is losing his grip on the difference between memory and the present. The play moves between times without scene breaks: Jo Mielziner's original set showed the whole house at once, and characters walked through walls in the past and used the doors in the present.

Miller's argument was that tragedy did not require a king. He wrote that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy as kings are, and that tragedy arises when a person is ready to lay down their life to secure their sense of personal dignity.

The most quoted line belongs to Willy's wife Linda, who says that he is not a great man, that he never made much money, but that he is a human being and a terrible thing is happening to him — so attention must be paid.

Directed by Elia Kazan, it opened in February 1949, ran for 742 performances, and won the Pulitzer Prize. Audiences wept and, according to contemporary reports, salesmen in the audience left in distress. It has been performed continuously somewhere in the world ever since.

“So attention must be paid.”

— Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, Act One, 1949

Why this matters

Death of a Salesman established that tragedy could be written about an ordinary working person, which changed what serious drama in English was allowed to be about.

You have the salesman on the stage. What would you ask him?

Ask Miller

• “Can an ordinary man be a tragic hero?”
• “Why does the play move between past and present without breaks?”
• “What is Linda asking for when she says attention must be paid?”
• “Is Willy destroyed by himself or by his society?”
• “Why did salesmen react so strongly?”

Chapter 3 · The Crucible

Salem in 1692, McCarthy in 1953

1952 – 1953 · Salem · New York

By the early 1950s the House Un-American Activities Committee was investigating communist influence in American life, and the entertainment industry in particular. Witnesses were required not merely to account for themselves but to name others. Those who refused were blacklisted and often unemployable for years.

In 1952 Elia Kazan, Miller's friend and the director of *Death of a Salesman*, testified to the committee and named eight people. Miller drove to see him, and their friendship broke.

He then went to Salem, Massachusetts, and read the 1692 witch trial records. The parallel he found was precise. In both cases the accused could save themselves by confessing and naming others; denial was treated as proof of guilt; the accusation itself was unanswerable, because the crime was invisible; and the proceedings were sincerely believed in by many participants.

*The Crucible* (1953) dramatises the trials through John Proctor, a farmer with a private guilt of his own, who is offered his life in exchange for a signed confession and a list of names. He signs and then tears it up, because the paper would be nailed to the church door and he cannot give away his name.

Miller was careful about the history — he read the depositions and used real names — while altering some facts, most significantly raising Abigail Williams's age from eleven to seventeen to make the affair with Proctor possible.

The first production in 1953 was received coolly; audiences found it cold, and some critics thought the parallel crude. It has since become one of the most performed plays in the world, and its title has entered ordinary English as a term for any proceeding that produces guilt by accusation.

Why this matters

The Crucible identified the structure common to all such proceedings — that denial is treated as evidence of guilt — which is why it applies far beyond McCarthy or Salem.

You have the play about naming names. What would you ask him?

Ask Miller

• “What did you find in the Salem records?”
• “Why is naming others the centre of the play?”
• “Why did you change Abigail's age?”
• “What broke your friendship with Elia Kazan?”
• “Why does Proctor tear up the confession?”

Chapter 4 · Before the Committee

1956, and a conviction overturned

1956 – 1962 · Washington · New York · Nevada

In 1956 Miller was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. The immediate trigger was that he had applied for a passport to attend the London production of *A View from the Bridge* — a play, as it happens, whose central character destroys himself by informing on two relatives.

He testified about his own past associations openly. He had attended some communist writers' meetings in the 1940s and said so. What he refused to do was name anyone else who had been present. He told the committee that he could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him.

The committee chairman offered a trade, later reported and never denied: the questioning could be dropped if Miller's fiancée, Marilyn Monroe, would consent to be photographed with him.

Miller was convicted of contempt of Congress in 1957, fined and given a suspended sentence. The conviction was overturned on appeal in 1958 on the grounds that he had not been adequately warned of the risk of contempt.

He married Monroe in June 1956, days after the hearing. The marriage lasted five years and was, by both accounts, difficult; he wrote the screenplay of *The Misfits* (1961) for her, and the shoot in the Nevada desert was miserable for everyone. They divorced in January 1961, and she died the following year.

*After the Fall* (1964), which features a self-destructive woman clearly modelled on Monroe, was widely attacked as an exploitation of her memory. Miller denied it and never convinced many people.

He married the photographer Inge Morath in 1962; the marriage lasted forty years until her death.

Why this matters

Miller's refusal to name names, and his conviction for it, is one of the clearest documented instances of an American writer paying a legal penalty for refusing to inform.

You have the hearing. What would you ask him?

Ask Miller

• “Why answer about yourself but refuse to name others?”
• “What was the offer involving Marilyn Monroe?”
• “How do you answer the charge that After the Fall exploited her?”
• “What did the blacklist do to people who were named?”
• “Would you testify the same way again?”

Chapter 5 · The Long Late Career

PEN, a farmhouse, and one private failure

1965 – 2005 and after · Connecticut · London · Roxbury

Miller was president of PEN International from 1965 to 1969 and used the position to campaign for imprisoned writers behind the Iron Curtain and elsewhere, work he continued for decades. He was among the more effective literary campaigners of the period, and he took it seriously.

He kept writing to the end — *The Price* (1968), *Broken Glass* (1994), *Resurrection Blues* (2002) — although American critics were often unenthusiastic. He was substantially more admired in Britain, where the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company revived him constantly, and he acknowledged the difference with some bitterness.

His late plays and essays returned repeatedly to responsibility: the connection between private conduct and public consequence, and the refusal of people to see what their choices have cost others.

One fact from his own life should be recorded, because it bears directly on that. In 1966 his son Daniel was born with Down's syndrome. Miller had him placed in an institution shortly afterwards, at a time when this was common medical advice, and by the accounts published after his death he rarely visited and did not mention Daniel in his 1987 autobiography *Timebends*. Inge Morath visited regularly. Daniel eventually moved into supported living and, by later reports, did well. Miller included him in his will. He never explained the decision publicly.

He died on 10 February 2005, aged eighty-nine, at his farmhouse in Connecticut.

*The Crucible* and *Death of a Salesman* are performed somewhere in the world almost continuously, and both are set texts in schools across the English-speaking world.

Why this matters

Miller's treatment of his son sits uncomfortably against a body of work insisting that people must acknowledge what their choices cost others — which is exactly why students should know about it.

You have the whole record. What would you ask him at the end?

Ask Miller

• “What did you do at PEN International?”
• “Why were you valued more in Britain than at home?”
• “Why did you never write about your son Daniel?”
• “Does your own life meet the standard your plays set?”
• “Why do your plays keep being revived?”

What Miller changed

Death of a Salesman established that tragedy could take an ordinary working person as its subject, and The Crucible gave English a permanent term for proceedings that treat accusation as proof. Both are among the most performed and most taught plays in the world, and Miller's refusal to name names before HUAC became a defining example of a writer's public conscience.

A debate that continues

Critics dispute whether Willy Loman is a victim of capitalism or of his own self-deception, and Miller's institutionalisation of his son Daniel, revealed after his death, is now weighed against the moral demands his plays make.

Keep exploring — ask Miller

• “What did you want the audience to do after Salesman ended?”
• “How does a whole society come to believe something untrue?”
• “What does a person owe the people they have harmed?”

Related lives

• J. B. Priestley — Author of An Inspector Calls
• George Orwell — Chronicler of the Total State
• John Steinbeck — Chronicler of the Dispossessed

Related themes

Modern drama and tragedy · McCarthyism and civil liberties · The American Dream