Arthur Miller

October 17, 2012

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On this date in 1915, Arthur Asher Miller was born in Harlem, New York City, to Polish Jewish immigrants. Miller’s father was a successful business owner until the markets crashed in 1929. Miller worked himself through the University of Michigan, where his talents as a playwright emerged. After graduating with a bachelor’s in English in 1938, Miller joined the Federal Theater Project in New York City until it was closed in 1939 by Congress due to concerns about possible communist affiliations. Miller married a Catholic woman in 1940 and they had two children together. Miller’s first Broadway play, “The Man Who Had All the Luck,” debuted in 1944 and won the Theater Guild’s National Award. His play, “All My Sons” (1940), earned Miller a Tony Award for Best Author. “Death of a Salesman” (1949), which Miller wrote in about six weeks, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the New York Drama Critic’s Circle Award and a Tony Award for Best Author. As a target of the House Un-American Activities Committee for suspected communist activity, Miller was inspired to pen “The Crucible,” which opened on Broadway in 1953, about the Salem witch trials of 1692. His son, Robert, from his first marriage produced the 1996 film adaptation starring Winona Ryder, and Miller wrote the screenplay. Miller left his first wife to marry Marilyn Monroe in 1956. The famous couple divorced in 1961. He married a photographer in 1962, and the couple had two children.

Miller said his family growing up “observed” Judaism two or three times a year during major holidays (“The Atheism Tapes,” BBC4). In this same interview, Miller remarked: “There are a lot of Americans, I think they’re a minority, but they are very vocal, who are really aching for an Ayatollah. I think they would love to have a department of religion. . . . But this country was founded by people who were really escaping domination of a governmental religion and who breathed freely here with gratitude that they didn’t have to obey a church government.” The author of over 30 plays, Miller received numerous awards in his lifetime, including seven Tony Awards, the John F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award and honorary doctorates from Oxford and Harvard Universities. Miller died of heart failure at age 89. D. 2005. 

“I tried to be a religious person when I was 12, 13, 14. It lasted about two years. And then it simply vanished. . . . I didn’t find (my roots) in religion, because religion, especially in the Depression in the ‘30s seemed absolutely absurdly irrelevant.”

— Arthur Miller, “The Atheism Tapes,” by Jonathan Miller, BBC4, 2004 

Compiled by Bonnie Gutsch - www.ffrf.org