Arthur Miller

Arthur Asher Miller was a titan of twentieth-century American drama and literature whose plays dissected the moral, political, and economic contradictions of modern society with unrelenting power. Born to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents in Harlem, New York City, Miller witnessed his father's prosperous women's clothing business shattered by the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The traumatic economic devastation of the Great Depression fundamentally forged Miller's lifelong commitment to exploring the fragility of human security and the cost of the capitalist rat race.

Graduating from the University of Michigan in 1938, where he won the Avery Hopwood Award for playwriting, Miller broke through on Broadway in 1947 with All My Sons, a searing moral indictment of wartime war-profiteering. In 1949, his masterpiece Death of a Salesman premiered, directed by Elia Kazan. The heartbreaking tragedy of traveling salesman Willy Loman earned Miller the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award, instantly cementing his place alongside Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams as the architects of modern American theater.

In 1953, at the height of Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist witch hunts, Miller wrote The Crucible, a terrifying allegory set during the 1692 Salem witch trials that warned of the catastrophic dangers of mass hysteria and state paranoia. Called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1956, Miller heroically refused to name suspected communist colleagues, enduring a conviction for contempt of Congress that was later overturned on appeal. Miller was also an outspoken president of PEN International, defending imprisoned writers globally. Married to film star Marilyn Monroe from 1956 to 1961, Miller passed away in Connecticut on February 10, 2005, at age eighty-nine.