Miller, Arthur

(b. 1915)

   US playwright. Miller was born in Harlem, New York, to an Austrian immigrant.

   His first successes were a war-time film script about army training, The Story of G.I.Joe, and the play All my Sons (1947). They were followed by his greatest critical and commercial success, Death of a Salesman (1949), which received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer prize and the Antionette Perry Award for that year. Miller’s subsequent work has included an adaptation of An Enemy of the People (1950) and The Crucible (1953). Although the setting of the latter is the 17-century witch trials at Salem, Massachusetts, it has been interpreted as an indictment of McCarthyism and the political witch-hunts of the 50s in America. Miller himself was later the victim of this campaign; in 1956 he was summoned before the House Committee on un-American Activities and cited for contempt.

   Other Miller plays are A View from the Bridge (1957); After the Fall (1964); Incident at Vichy (1966); and The Price (1968). He wrote the film script for The Misfits (1961) which starred his second wife, the actress Marilyn Monroe. They were divorced in 1962. In 1972. he wrote The Creation of the World and Other Business. Later works include The American Clock (1980), The Arch-bishop’s Ceiling (1980) and the television drama Playing for Time (1980) which was based on Fania Fenelon’s memoir of Auschwitz. His autobiography Time Bends appeared in 1987.