Arthur Miller

Born in New York in 1915, Miller grew up in Brooklyn and came of age during the Great Depression. The son of a salesman, Miller worked as a store clerk in an automobile parts warehouse to help pay his tuition at the University of Michigan, where his playwriting skills earned him awards at an early age. On his return to New York, Miller wrote radio scripts for CBS, the Columbia Workshop and the Calvacade of America. In 1944, The Man Who Had All the Luck, his first play, was produced. In 1947, his breakthrough play, All My Sons, won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. Miller continued to win acclaim for his plays, which include A View From the Bridge (1955), After the Fall (1964), The Price (1968) and Broken Glass (1995), which won the Olivier Award for Best Play. The 1998 production of A View From the Bridge garnered two Tony Awards and the 1999 production of Death of a Salesman garnered four.

Miller’s 1953 masterpiece, The Crucible, brought him a Tony Award and a storm of controversy. The play, about the Salem witch-hunt trials, was widely perceived to be an attack on the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Miller was called before the Committee in 1954, and was cited for contempt of Congress when he refused to cooperate and name names. That conviction was later overturned on appeal.

In addition to his plays, Miller has also written for film and television. In 1961 his first screenplay, The Misfits, was produced. In 1980, Miller won an Emmy Award for Playing for Time, and in 1995 he earned an Academy Award nomination for his adaptation of The Crucible. Miller has also written a number of books including Situation Normal (1944), Focus (1945), his autobiography Timebends: A Life (1987), and several collaborative books with his wife of 37 years, Ingeborg Morath. Miller passed away in 2005, after a writing career that spanned seven decades.