Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller might have rightly been called a jock when he was growing up in Brooklyn, New York-which might explain why he was able to marry such a superstar as Marilyn Monroe. It wasn't until after working in a auto parts warehouse and reading Dostoevsky that he decided he wanted to be a writer.

Miller attended the University of Michigan to study journalism and was immediately recognized for his playwriting ability. When he graduated, he joined the Federal Theatre Project. A football injury kept Miller out of the draft and he began writing plays, his first one closing quickly before his second one, All My Sons, won critical acclaim. In the mean time, he began writing novels and screenplays.

In 1949, Miller earned international fame with the publication and production of Death of a Salesman. Some years later, Miller became a victim of McCarthyism: a committee denied him a passport, causing him to miss the Brussels opening of the play he wrote as an allegory of the McCarthy era and mass hysteria.

For five years, Miller was married to Marilyn Monroe and spent much of that period writing screenplays, often with roles for his wife. In 1964, he returned to the stage with an autobiographical play that many critics suspect was based on Monroe, though Miller denied it. He then married an Austrian photographer. He continued for the next several decades to write plays, screenplays, essays, and memoirs.

Miller died of heart failure in February 2005.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

--B. Redman