Arthur Miller

Born in 1915 in Harlem, New York, to a prosperous Polish-Jewish family whose fortunes were destroyed by the 1929 crash, Miller watched his father go from owning a successful coat manufacturing business to near-destitution. The family moved to a small house in Brooklyn, and Miller worked in an auto parts warehouse to save money for college at the University of Michigan, where he began writing plays. His early Broadway efforts failed, but All My Sons (1947), directed by Elia Kazan, announced a major dramatist with its unflinching portrait of wartime profiteering. Death of a Salesman (1949) won the Pulitzer Prize and became the defining American tragedy of the twentieth century, its portrait of Willy Loman's self-destruction a mirror held up to the nation's worship of success. The Crucible (1953), his allegory of the McCarthy witch hunts set in colonial Salem, was written while Miller himself was under suspicion; he was convicted of contempt of Congress in 1957 for refusing to name names, a conviction later overturned. His marriage to Marilyn Monroe in 1956 made him the most famous playwright alive. After the Fall (1964) and The Price (1968) continued his investigation of guilt and responsibility. He died on February 10, 2005, at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, fifty-six years to the day after Salesman opened on Broadway.

In 1956, summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Miller was quietly offered a deal: the chairman would cancel the hearing if Marilyn Monroe, his new wife, would pose for a photograph with him. Miller refused, sat before the committee, and declined to name a single name.