Death of a Salesman (by Arthur Miller)

Miller, Arthur - 1915–, American dramatist, b. New York City, grad. Univ. of Michigan, 1938. Miller's plays are concerned with morality and the pressures exerted on people by family and society. His masterpiece, Death of a Salesman (1949; Pulitzer Prize), is the story of a salesman betrayed by his own hollow values and those of American society. The Crucible (1953) is both a dynamic dramatization of the 17th-century Salem witch trials and a parable about the United States in the McCarthy era (see McCarthy, Joseph Raymond). In A View from the Bridge (1955; Pulitzer Prize) Miller studies a Sicilian-American longshoreman whose unacknowledged lust for his niece destroys him and his family. Miller's life with his second wife, Marilyn Monroe, is fictionalized in his After the Fall (1964).

Miller's other plays include The Man Who Had All the Luck (1940), All My Sons (1947), Incident at Vichy (1965), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), The Ride down Mount Morgan (1991), Broken Glass (1994), and Resurrection Blues (2002). He has also written a screenplay, The Misfits (1961); television dramas, Playing for Time (1980) and Clara (1991); a novel, Focus (1945); and a study of the Soviet Union, In Russia (1969), with photographs by his third wife, Inge Morath. Miller's The Theater Essays (1971) is a collection of writings about the craft of playwriting and the nature of modern tragedy, and Echoes down the Corridor (2000) is a collection of essays (1944–2000), many of them autobiographical.

See his autobiography, Timebends (1987); biography by M. Gottfried (2003); studies by B. Nelson (1970), R. Hayman (1972), H. Bloom (1987), and N. Carson (1988).

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