Arthur Miller will be remembered by some as the intellectual who made a famously unsuitable marriage to Marilyn Monroe, and by others as the staunch liberal who risked imprisonment by defying the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. But his main legacy is the series of plays — Death of a Salesman and The Crucible prime among them — that had established him as his nation’s leading dramatist by the mid-1950s and continue to be revived and studied throughout the world.

Miller said that he saw himself as “a sort of prophet”, heir to a tradition of civic responsibility and political involvement which, he claimed, went back to the Greek playwrights. For him, it was the function of drama not merely to ask “great questions” but to seek to “create a higher consciousness” and even to “change the world”. Whether or not he achieved quite that, he certainly brought a unique blend of intelligence, moral passion and dramatic skill to many of the 20th century’s central concerns, from the lure of materialism to the importance of the individual conscience and the significance of the Holocaust.

The dramatist-to-be was born in 1915, the son of affluent Jewish-American parents, and brought up in the then prosperous New York district of Harlem. But in 1929 his father’s coat-manufacturing business, which at one time had employed nearly a thousand workers, was hit by the Depression, and the family was eventually forced to move to humbler quarters in Brooklyn.

The impact of this period on Miller cannot be overestimated. For him, the Depression was a “millenarian moment” matched in importance in American history only by the Civil War. As he once said: “Until 1929 I thought things were pretty solid and somebody was in charge, probably a businessman and a realistic, no- nonsense fellow. In 1929 he jumped out of the window. It was bewildering.”

The Depression was to feature in several of Miller’s plays, notably The American Clock and The Price, both of which see it as painful yet cleansing proof of the fragility not only of the social contract but also of family ties. According to his autobiography, Timebends, the disruption extended to his own family, with his mother showing a “sneering contempt” for the husband whom she blamed for their impoverishment.

The failure of his father’s business meant that there was no money to send Miller to university in 1932 after he graduated from high school — where in any case he had shone more on the sporting field than in the classroom. So he became a $15-a-week shipping clerk in an automobile parts warehouse. He began to read voraciously, developing an interest both in politics and in literature. Before long he had embraced socialism, and though his thinking was always more in the liberal-humanist tradition of Emerson, he began to call himself a Marxist. He also secured himself a place at the University of Michigan, and there he started to write plays, paying his way largely with the money these proceeded to make from the college’s literary prizes.

On his graduation in 1938 Miller joined the Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal agency established to provide jobs for actors, writers and theatre technicians. But with Congress nervous of communist infiltration, the scheme was discontinued before he could finish The Golden Years, a play relating Cortéz’s conquest of the Aztec empire to events in contemporary Europe.

Miller then took a job in the Brooklyn Navy Yard — an experience on which he was to draw in A View from the Bridge, his play about Italian longshoremen — and made his first marriage, in 1940, to Mary Slattery, the Catholic daughter of an insurance salesman.

With a knee injury sustained in high school keeping him out of the Armed Forces during the Second World War, Miller continued to live, work and write in Brooklyn. For a while during the early 1940s he wrote 28-minute storytelling radio scripts for CBS, sponsored by companies such as DuPont and American Steel (“I only worked for the best”).

These broadcasts — recordings of which unexpectedly surfaced in 2003 — were written to order on subjects that he had quickly to assimilate and turn into drama. They ranged from the story of the discovery of penicillin and current wartime heroism to tales about historical figures, and in writing them against a deadline, Miller learnt some of the disciplines and possibilities of his trade. “My model was the book of Genesis. Read that and within about a page and a half you have mankind; that’s the way to tell a story.”

Some of these scripts were in verse, and Miller later recalled that it was thanks to actors of the calibre of Orson Welles and their training in Shakespeare that he could use the conciseness of verse without it sounding arch, and without the audience even realising that they were listening to verse.

His social conscience, too, was stirring. A three-week visit to an early plastic surgery and burns unit, for instance, led him to write a memo to the station, arguing that the broadcasts should give a more realistic idea of the suffering of war, because anything less dishonoured the men they were trying to support.

In 1944 Miller saw his play The Man Who Had All the Luck open on Broadway and close after only four performances. This was, however, followed by All My Sons, a masterpiece which won the Drama Critics’ Circle Award for 1947. Two years later came Death of a Salesman, which ran on Broadway for 742 performances, won the Pulitzer prize and the Tony award for best play, and established Miller as one of the major dramatists of his generation.

Both plays dealt with themes that were to recur in Miller’s work, the damage wrought by materialist values and the fragmentation of the family. In All My Sons, the protagonist is a businessman who has allowed defective parts to be fitted to aircraft, thus causing a series of fatal crashes. The consequences come home to him with truly tragic inevitability. In Death of a Salesman, the protagonist is Willy Loman, the commercial traveller and archetypal American dreamer. Whether or not Loman really demonstrated that the common man was a fit subject for tragedy — as the author himself suggested in the most important of his many essays about the theatre — he remains the best-known of Miller’s characters.

As Miller grew more prominent, his left-wing sympathies increasingly became the object of suspicion and attack. His adaptation of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, staged in 1950, was rightly seen as a swipe at McCarthyite persecution. But that was a minor provocation beside The Crucible, which retold the story of the Salem witchhunts and celebrated the “terrible marvel” of victims prepared to die rather than lie. Retelling this tale during the fevered period of America’s 20th-century witch-hunts, this won Miller a Tony award for the best play of 1953, but also the enmity of the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities.

Thanks to the committee’s influence, Miller was denied a passport to attend the opening of The Crucible in Belgium and had funding withdrawn from a film he was making about violence among young people in New York.

A direct confrontation with the committee was delayed until 1956, however, by which time Miller had become a nationwide celebrity for somewhat surprising reasons. The earnest intellectual had divorced his wife and was about to marry the actress Marilyn Monroe. Eager to trade on the publicity this generated, the committee summoned Miller — only to have him refuse to name the people he had seen at a communist writers’ meeting in 1949. Unlike Miller, his friend and colleague Elia Kazan, who had directed All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, did name names during the McCarthy period, causing tension in an already complex professional relationship.

For his refusal Miller was cited for contempt of Congress. In 1957 he was brought before the House, fined $500 and given a suspended 30-day prison sentence: a conviction that was overturned when his appeal came before the Supreme Court a year later.

This experience found dramatic expression in After the Fall, a semi-autobiographical play produced in 1964, as did his relationship to Marilyn Monroe. His marriage to the deeply insecure and demanding actress — a woman “dancing at the edge of oblivion”, as he put it in Timebends — had predictably proved to be a difficult and often stormy one, and it ended in divorce in 1961. In 1962 he was married for the third and last time, to the Austrian-born photographer Ingeborg Morath, a relationship that allowed the often despairing After the Fall to end in an affirmation of the importance of love.

Miller became president of PEN International in 1965, and was primarily responsible for transforming it from an inconsequential literary club into what he called “the conscience of the world writing community”: It was, for instance, due to his intervention that Wole Soyinka was saved from execution during the Biafran war and Fernando Arrabal from imprisonment in Franco’s Spain. Right into his seventies, Miller was a remarkably energetic, outgoing, good-humoured man, a tireless crusader for human rights as well as an active playwright.

While critics tend to agree that his most vital creative period stretched from All My Sons in 1947 to A View from the Bridge in 1956, his later plays, notably The Price, The American Clock and The Archbishop’s Ceiling, have their admirers. His adaptation of Fania Fenelon’s Playing for Time, in which Vanessa Redgrave played an Auschwitz inmate, was widely regarded as one of the most distinguished dramas ever written for television.

However, his reputation in recent years, though robust in the academies of both countries, has proved more resilient among British than among American theatregoers. The National Theatre alone has revived Death of a Salesman, The American Clock, After the Fall, A View from the Bridge and, on no fewer than three occasions, The Crucible, in most cases with conspicuous success. Indeed, Miller’s disenchantment with what he called “the brutal inanity of Broadway ” explains why two of his most recent plays, The Ride Down Mount Morgan and The Last Yankee received their world premieres in London in 1991 and 1993 respectively.

His Broken Glass was staged at the National Theatre in 1994, and his fascination with memory continued with Mr Peter’s Connections, staged in London in 2000. His last plays were Resurrection Blues (2002), a satire on how the media would cope with the Second Coming, and Finishing the Picture (2004) inspired by the troubled shooting of the film The Misfits (1961), featuring Monroe herself and Clark Gable.

Some have attacked Miller for writing (in the words of the critic Robert Brustein) “old-fashioned, social-psychological melodramas” on the theme of political or family responsibility. Certainly, many of his plays are furnaces or, as he put it, crucibles in which an exemplary individual’s principles are tested and judged according to their integrity and their altruism. And certainly Miller continued to communicate an unfashionable belief in the potential of man — and the key figures are almost always male — for good as well as ill. As he once said: “The European playwrights can tell me it’s hopeless, and by and large it is; but it’s not 100 per cent hopeless is all I’m about to tell you.”

There were a son and daughter of Miller’s first marriage. His third wife died in 2002. They had one daughter, Rebecca Miller, a film director, who married the actor Daniel Day-Lewis after he starred in a film version of The Crucible in 1996, for which Miller himself wrote the film adaptation.





Arthur Miller, dramatist, was born on October 17, 1915. He died on February 10, 2005, aged 89.