Arthur Miller, who secured his place in the pantheon of major American dramatists of the last century by addressing some of its most urgent and complex moral issues, died Thursday night. He was 89.
Miller died of heart failure at his home in Roxbury, Conn., his assistant, Julia Bolus, said Friday. His family was at his bedside, she said.
Ironically, for all his renown as a playwright, Miller was probably best known to a generation of Americans as the husband of Marilyn Monroe.
Miller once said, "The American dream is largely the unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out." In "Death of a Salesman," his most celebrated play, and his other works, Miller memorably and movingly explored the dashed hopes and ruin that were so often the consequence of pursuing that dream.
In more than 30 plays that brought him a Pulitzer Prize, seven Tony awards and countless other honors, Miller's dramas affirmed his contention that tragedy "brings us knowledge . . . pertaining to the right way of living in the world." Through the anguish of fractured and conflicted family relationships, he urged individual connection and responsibility to the wider community.
At the height of his powers in the 1940s and '50s, Miller's masterworks — "All My Sons," "Death of a Salesman," "The Crucible" and "A View from the Bridge" — fused psychological realism and a probing seriousness in a way that found a wide response and made him a voice of conscience in postwar American culture. His gifts amply suited the times and tapped into the prevailing mood of malaise that lay beneath the surface of the booming prosperity after World War II.
Miller was, in the assessment of playwright Tony Kushner, "exemplary of art's greatest paradox. He is a writer of tragedy who is productive of hope."
Miller's rangy build and craggy features — combined with the unsparing moral authority of his dramas — led many journalists to describe him as "Lincolnesque." Dustin Hoffman, who played a heralded Willie Loman on Broadway in a 1984 revival of "Death of a Salesman," said Miller "looks like a California redwood and talks like a New York taxi driver."
Arthur Miller was born in Harlem on Oct. 17, 1915. His father, Isidore, was barely literate, an immigrant entrepreneur whose business collapsed during the Depression, a defining blow that forced the family to live in drastically reduced circumstances and shaped the playwright's political outlook and resonated through his work.
At school, Miller was an accomplished athlete and indifferent student; he was 17 before he read anything weightier than "Tom Swift." But after graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, he began reading Dickens and Dostoyevsky and decided on a writing career.
He wrote preachy anti-capitalist plays about the Depression when he studied drama at the University of Michigan and then tried his luck in New York. Ironically, he first made it into print in a significant way as a novelist with the publication of "Focus," a work that dealt with wartime anti-Semitism on the home front.
The book was a considerable success, but Miller persevered as a dramatist. Away from the typewriter, he liked to work with wood and became a master carpenter and furniture-maker: his finest works suggest a sense of interlocking structure.
His first stab at a Broadway play was in 1944 with "The Man Who Had All the Luck"; it enjoyed absolutely none and flopped. Undaunted, he came back two years later with "All My Sons," a powerful drama in which a family is torn apart by a father's reckless greed. Protagonist Joe Keller is an aircraft-parts manufacture who jeopardizes the lives of American pilots by cutting corners.
In that play Keller's son declares: "Once and for all you must know there's a universe of people outside, and you're responsible to it." The line became a recurring motif in Miller's future work.
Incredibly, the drama that established Miller as a playwright of the first rank, a work now widely regarded as the great American play, took him only eight weeks to write.
"Death of a Salesman," directed by Elia Kazan, opened at the Morosco Theater in February 1949 with Lee. J. Cobb as Willy Loman. The tragedy of Loman, a traveling salesman "riding on a smile and a shoeshine" who is destroyed by the warped values he embraced, spoke with cautionary and wrenching eloquence.
"Death of a Salesman" caused a sensation, ran for 700 performances and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. The 1951 Hollywood film version starred Frederic March. The play was last revived on Broadway in 1999 — a half century after its premiere — to much renewed acclaim. Brian Dennehy won a Tony Award for his reading of Loman.
In 1953's "The Crucible," Miller drew inescapable and telling parallels between the Salem witch trials of 1692 — the play's overt subject — and the persecutions in the name of anticommunism orchestrated by Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Not surprisingly, given the prevailing political climate, the drama was tepidly received.
Miller testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was indicted for contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate but later exonerated. Kazan complied with the committee and named names of those who had been with him in the Communist party in the '30s. It led to a long and bitter estrangement between the playwright and his most sympathetic director. "The Crucible" a powerful rendering of the fate of John Proctor and his principled stand against the hysteria of his time, eventually became a repertory staple — the most performed play, from high school stages to Broadway, in the Miller canon.
"It seems to be one of the few shards of the so-called McCarthy period that survives," Miller wrote in "Echoes Down the Corridor," a collection of his essays. "I think that to many people in so many parts of the world its story seems so like their own."
Miller was often likened to Ibsen, but he took Greek tragedy as the template of his inspiration. He felt that that tragedy could be used to encompass the lives of ordinary men, not just heroes and kings. "The tragic feeling is evoked in us," he once wrote, "when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing — his sense of personal dignity."
"A View from the Bridge" followed the classical model in dealing with the downfall of an Italian-American longshoreman destroyed by a passion for his niece by marriage.
The play met with the same cool reception as "The Crucible," and Miller wrote nothing for the stage for almost a decade.
His life was consumed by personal upheaval. The unwelcome publicity that came with the investigation of Miller erupted into media hysteria in 1956, when he divorced his first wife, Mary Slattery, and married Marilyn Monroe in an intensely chronicled union that lasted five years.
After their divorce, Miller made his third and lasting marriage to Inge Morath, an Austrian-born photographer who died in 2002. Miller had two children, Jane Ellen and Robert, by his first wife; he and Morath had one daughter, Rebecca, who is married to actor Daniel Day-Lewis.
The only work of substance he produced during his years with Monroe was the screenplay for John Huston's "The Misfits," which starred her and Clark Gable. It was the last film for both stars.
Miller's major theatrical works in the '60s included the autobiographical "After the Fall" (1964), which many critics chastised as a tasteless exploitation of his relationship with Monroe.
He followed it with "Incident at Vichy" (1964), a consideration of the issue of complicity and responsibility in World War II France, and "The Price" (1968), a drama of the confrontation of two brothers and the choices they made in life. It was Miller's last popular success on Broadway.
In the last decades of his life, Miller's stature as America's greatest living playwright was certainly acknowledged, but his tendency toward issue-oriented, didactic drama fell out of favor in the United States. His newer works, however, were admired and performed abroad, especially on the London stage. About this difference, director Robert Brustein once wryly observed that "England and America were two countries divided by a common playwright."
"The American Clock," Miller's panoramic portrait of people caught up in the Depression, lasted just 12 performances on Broadway, but enjoyed a successful London run and won the Olivier Award. Other later works include "The Ride Down Mount Morgan" (1991) and a scattershot satire on politics and the media in "Resurrection Blues." That play received its East Coast premiere in a Wilma Theater production in 2003, but it did not go on to Broadway. However, Miller's "After the Fall" was successfully revived on Broadway in the summer of 2004.
In his 1987 autobiography "Timebends," Miller added his prominent voice to the many deploring what has happened to American theater. "The whole theatrical enterprise was gasping and near death," he said.
"We're making it practically impossible." he complained in another interview, "for actors or new writers to make a living in the American theater, while a handful of big musicals are making a mint."
In perhaps his most indelible line, Willie Loman's wife Linda defends her husband: "He is a human being and terrible things are happening to him. So, attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be paid."
At his most rewarding and forceful, Arthur Miller made sure that we paid it.