Biography of Arthur Miller By Amulya Babu Young

Biography of Arthur Miller By Amulya Babu

Young Miller • Arthur Miller is one of the famous play writers in the twentieth century. • He was born in October 1915 in New York City to a women's clothing manufacturer, who lost everything in the economic collapse of the 1930 s in the U. S • He lived through young adulthood during the Great Depression, Miller suffered the poverty that surrounded him. The Depression gave him ideas for his plays. • After graduating from high school, Miller worked in a warehouse so that he could earn enough money to attend the University of Michigan. This is where he began to write plays.

Failures and Achievements • Miller's first play to make it to Broadway was called “The Man Who Had All the Luck” in 1944. • It was a failure though. It closed or stopped playing after only four performances. • This setback discouraged Miller from writing completely, but he gave himself one more try. • Three years later, “All My Sons” won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award as the best play of 1947. This success finally made Miller a theatrical star. And encouraged him to keep writing.

Famous Plays and Awards • Death of a Salesman (1949) secured Miller's reputation as one of the nation's leading playwrights. • Miller won a Tony Award for Death of a Salesman as well as a Pulitzer Prize. • The play has been frequently brought back in films, television, and stage versions

Crucible Trails • Miller followed Death of a Salesman with his most politically significant work, The Crucible (1953). • This is a story of the Salem witch trials that contains obvious analogies to the Mc. Carthyism. • The arguable nature of the politics in “The Crucible” admires those who refuse to names. This led to the play's mixed response. • In later years, however, it has become one of the most studied and performed plays of American theater.

Crucible Trails • The Crucible is often seen as an act of denouncing Mc. Carthyism. • Miller had worked on several projects with Elia Kazan, who in 1952 testified and identified members or former members of the Communist Party. • Miller was under some suspicion of being a Communist or sympathizer himself, based on the petitions he signed and meetings he attended back in the 1940 s.

Crucible Trails • Three years after The Crucible, in 1956, Miller found himself mistreated by the very force that he warned against. • He was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. • Miller refused to name people he saw at a Communist writers' meeting a decade before, and he was convicted of disrespect. • He later won an appeal.

Marriage and Family • Soon after his trails in 1956, Miller married actress Marilyn Monroe in the same year but they divorced in 1961, one year before her death. • That year Monroe appeared in her last film, The Misfits, which is based on an original screenplay by Miller. • After divorcing Monroe, Miller married Ingeborg Morath, to whom he remained married until his death in 2005. The pair had a son and a daughter. • He died in 2005, at the age of 89.

Bibliography 1. http: //answers. yahoo. com/question/index? qid=20080504155653 AAVeef. O 2. http: //www. gradesaver. com/author/arthur-miller/ 3. http: //en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Arthur_Miller 4. http: //www. gradesaver. com/author/arthur-miller/wfu. edu/2012/02/arthur-miller-and-thehouse-un-american-activities-committee-in-the-limelight/