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Arthur Miller, Moral Voice of American Stage, Dies at 89

By MARILYN BERGER NYT Published: February 11, 2005

The author of "Death of a Salesman" and "The Crucible" exposed the flaws in the fabric of the American dream.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Julia Bolus, his assistant.
The author of "Death of a Salesman," a landmark of 20th-century drama, Mr. Miller grappled with the weightiest matters of social conscience in his plays and in them often reflected or reinterpreted the stormy and very public elements of his own life - including a brief and rocky marriage to Marilyn Monroe and his staunch refusal to cooperate with the red-baiting House Un-American Activities Committee.

"Death of a Salesman," which opened on Broadway in 1949, established Mr. Miller as a giant of the American theater when he was only 33. It won the triple crown of theatrical artistry that year: the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Tony.

But the play's enormous success also overshadowed Mr. Miller's long career: "The Crucible," a 1953 play about the Salem witch trials inspired by his virulent hatred of McCarthyism, and "A View From the Bridge," a 1955 drama of obsession and betrayal, ultimately took their place as popular classics of the international stage, but Mr. Miller's later plays never equaled his early successes. Although he wrote a total of 17 plays, "The Price," produced on Broadway during the 1967-68 season, was his last solid critical and commercial hit.

Mr. Miller also wrote successfully in a wide variety of other media. Perhaps most notably, he supplied the screenplay for "The Misfits," a 1961 movie directed by John Huston and starring Monroe, to whom he was married at the time. He also wrote essays, short stories and a 1987 autobiography, "Timebends: A Life." His writing remained politically engaged until the end of his life.

But his reputation rests on a handful of his best-known plays, the dramas of guilt and betrayal and redemption that continue to be revived frequently at theaters all over the world. These dramas of social conscience were drawn from life and informed by the Great Depression, the event that he believed had a more profound impact on the nation than any other in American history, except, possibly, the Civil War. "In play after play," the drama critic Mel Gussow wrote in The New York Times, "he holds man responsible for his and for his neighbor's actions."

He had known hard work firsthand in an automobile-parts warehouse during the Depression; in what he called a mouse house, where he earned $15 a month feeding mice used in medical experiments; and on the night shift in the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II.


Obituary: Arthur Miller BBC

Arthur Miller was America's foremost post-war playwright. His works, intricate musings on the darkness at the heart of the American Dream, struck a chord with a whole generation of theatre-goers throughout the world.

Miller's best-known character, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, the little man, destroyed by the pressures of modern life, stunned the audience at the play's Philadelphia premiere in 1949.

Some wept. Arthur Miller became famous overnight.

He was born in New York in 1915. His father owned a garment factory but faced financial ruin after the Great Crash of 1929.

He worked in menial jobs to pay his way through college where he studied journalism and became a radical.

His first stage play, All My Sons, portrayed the impact on a family of American participation in World War II. Miller was attacked as unpatriotic. He said that he was just telling the truth.

In due course his liberal views caught him in the McCarthy anti-communist witch-hunt. He testified before a congressional committee, refusing to name friends and colleagues who might have been communists and was held in contempt.

Surprising marriage


"I feel the same as I ever did," he said at the time, "which is that I don't believe that a man has to become an informer in order to practice his profession freely in the United States."

He found a parallel for McCarthy in the Salem witch trials in New England in 1692 and wrote The Crucible, a devastating study of mass hysteria and denunciation.

Years later, Miller also wrote the screenplay for The Crucible, a film starring his son-in-law, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Winona Ryder.

Many were astonished when he married Marilyn Monroe in 1956. The bookish intellectual and the doomed screen goddess made an unlikely couple.
Out of fashion

He admired her courage, he said, but it did not last. Following their breakup in 1961, Miller married the renowned photographer Inge Morath, whom he met on the set of the film The Misfits, which he wrote and which starred Monroe.

In later years Arthur Miller went out of fashion in America. He complained that writers there were treated as entertainers, not moralists, and railed against what he regarded the hollow commercialism of Broadway.

The rejection exaggerated the gloom from which he fashioned his plays and which he freely admitted.

"I do think that most things end badly," he said. "Most human enterprise disappoints."

Sought to provoke

His work continued to be loved and admired in the UK and in 1995 his Broken Glass won the prestigious Olivier Award for best play.

He himself directed Death of a Salesman for the Chinese stage. The audience, for whom the Cultural Revolution provided its own particular resonances, was delighted.

Arthur Miller's legacy is such that, on any one day, his work is being performed somewhere in the world.

Beyond the glare of stardom and the Pulitzer Prize which he won for Salesman, he sought to provoke his audience into questioning society and authority.

After the events of 11 September 2001, Miller said the attacks had been part of a "war against humanity".

"Ever since Stalin and the Nazis, reality has transcended fiction," he said.

He also expressed some doubts about President George W Bush's ability to tackle the crisis, and warned that emergency measures introduced by the US government might have a negative impact on liberty.

A man of the highest integrity, both in his work and in his personal life, Arthur Miller was an old-fashioned liberal, who never accepted the American dream at face value.

Theatres on Broadway have darkened in tribute to Arthur Miller, the American regarded as one of the greatest dramatists of the last century.

The author of Death of a Salesman died at 89 of heart failure on Thursday evening, surrounded by family and friends at his home in Connecticut.

Tributes have flooded in for the man who was once Marilyn Monroe's husband.

"He had such a great life that you don't feel sad for Arthur," said renowned Broadway actress Zoe Caldwell.

In his final decades, Miller grew disillusioned with the New York district at the heart of the US theatre world, describing it in 1991 as a place in "open terror of the critics and of losing fortunes of money".
But there was mourning on Broadway on Friday, where houses went dark at 2000 (0100 GMT).

Here is a list of Miller's works:
· Honors at Dawn - 1936
· No Villain: They Too Arise - 1937
· The Man Who Had All the Luck - 1944
· All My Sons - 1947
· Death of a Salesman - 1949
· The Crucible - 1953
· A View from the Bridge - 1955
· A Memory of Two Mondays - 1955
· After the Fall - 1964
· Incident at Vichy - 1965
· The Price - 1969
· The Creation of the World and Other Business - 1972
· Up From Paradise - 1974
· The Archbishop's Ceiling - 1976
· The American Clock - 1980
· Elegy for a Lady and Some Kind of Love Story, produced together under title Two-Way Mirror - 1983
· Playing for Time - 1986
· The Golden Years - 1990
· The Last Yankee - 1991
· The Ride Down Mt Morgan - 1991
· Broken Glass - 1994
· Mr Peters' Connections - 1998
· Resurrection Blues - 2002
· Finishing the Picture - 2004

Arthur Miller (1915-2005)