Bloom's Literature
Miller Arthur
Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to life.
— "Requiem," Death of a Salesman (1949)
Arthur Miller was born in upper Manhattan and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His father had a prosperous suit-and-coat
company that went bankrupt when Miller was thirteen, a year before the stock market crashed. The family moved to
modest quarters in Brooklyn, which many critics see as a motivating experience for many of Miller's plays.
Miller went to the University of Michigan in 1934, after two years of working at menial jobs. He won the Avery
Hopwood Creative Writing Award for plays in his sophomore and junior years and placed second as a senior. He received
his A.B. in 1938. His first play produced on Broadway, The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), was a flop, closing after
four performances. His second play, All My Sons (produced 1947), was a hit; it ran for 328 performances and received the
New York Drama Critics Circle Award. The play concerns a manufacturer who sold shoddy airplane parts that led to the
death of his son in World War II. Although melodramatic and sentimental, this play showcased Miller's vision of what a
moral society should stand for and the failures of individuals to abide by or to find their own standards of integrity.
Death of a Salesman (produced 1949) is considered Miller's masterpiece. It ran for 742 performances and won the New
York Drama Critics Circle Award, a Tony Award, and a Pulitzer Prize. It established him as one of the major voices in the
postwar American theater. In the story of Willy Loman, Miller believed he had created the tragedy of the common man.
Willy stands for every American who wants to get ahead, who dreams that he and his sons will be well liked and
prosperous. Death of a Salesman melds different styles, combining realism and expressionism, so that the audience can
both identify with the social consequences of what happens to Willy and his family and also appreciate the play as a
psychological study.
While no other play by Miller has achieved the same level of acclaim, his reenactment of the Salem witch-hunts, The
Crucible (produced 1953), has proven to be an enduring work. At a time when Senator Joseph McCarthy was labeling
certain Americans as communist subversives in what many called a witch-hunt, the parallels were difficult to ignore—and
Miller apparently encouraged the analogy between the seventeenth century and his own time. A View from the Bridge
(produced 1955) once again poses the struggle of a tormented man against the values of his own society. Eddie Carbone, a
longshoreman who harbors incestuous feelings for his daughter, comes into conflict with the illegal immigrant he has
welcomed into his house and who courts his daughter. Eddie turns informer and has the police apprehend the immigrant
and implicates friends who had been Communists.
In 1956 Miller, who had just married actress Marilyn Monroe, was called to testify before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. He admitted attending a communist meeting but refused to name other participants. He was
convicted the next year of contempt of Congress, a charge that was overturned on appeal in 1958.
Miller drew on his troubled marriage to Monroe, which ended in divorce in 1961, just a year before her death, and his
political difficulties in After the Fall (produced 1964), which directly addresses the cold war hysteria over communism.
As in A View from the Bridge, After the Fall has a narrator, a device that reflects Miller's tendency in some of his work to
direct his audience's attention to the message of his plays.
Miller's later plays received mixed reviews, except for The Price (1968), a taut drama about two brothers who struggle
with each other for the meaning of their lives and their family history. The Creation of the World and Other Business
(1972), a comic reworking of the Adam and Eve story, excited little interest—as did The American Clock (1980), Miller's
portrayal of the Great Depression, and The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1992), although the latter received favorable notices
in England. Broken Glass (1994), the most recent Broadway production of a new Miller play, was a failure, largely due to
its trite, melodramatic, and sentimental treatment of the Holocaust.
Collected Plays was published in 1957 and Collected Plays, Volume II in 1981. The latter includes Miller's screenplay,
The Misfits (1961), a motion picture that starred Clark Gable and Monroe.
Miller published a novel, Focus (1945), a study of anti-Semitism. His short fiction is included in I Don't Need You
Anymore (1967) and Homely Girl, A Life, and Other Stories (1995). Miller's nonfiction works include several travel books
with photographs by his wife Inge Morath: In Russia (1969), In the Country (1977), and Chinese Encounters (1979). He
wrote a memoir about the Chinese production of his most famous play, Salesman in Beijing (produced 1984). Miller
published his memoirs, Timebends: A Life, in 1987. In 1999 Miller received the Tony Lifetime Achievement Award.
Studying Arthur Miller
Students studying the life and work of Arthur Miller will be well served to begin with his first successful play, All My
Sons (produced 1947), which will acquaint the reader with the themes and use of dialect common in Miller's work. From
there the student should read Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, both of which contributed to Miller's recognition as
a master playwright.
Penguin Books published The Portable Arthur Miller, edited by Christopher Bigsby (New York, 2003), which is a useful
text for studying Miller's work. The 2003 edition includes both the original introduction to the first 1970 edition by
Harold Clurman as well as a revised introduction by Bigsby, which allows the reader to observe the similarity of thematic
concerns in Miller scholarship in the last four decades. The text also provides an extensive bibliography of Miller's large
body of work that will guide the reader toward his twenty-four plays, his fiction and nonfiction, and articles and
interviews. The Portable Arthur Miller also includes an excerpt from Miller's first published play, Golden Years
(produced 1939), as well as his Broken Glass (produced 1994), which won the Oliver Award for Best Play of 1995.
Students wishing to read the entire early body of Miller's work should consult Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1944–1961,
edited by Tony Kushner. The collected work includes the autobiographical one-act play A Memory of Two Mondays,
Miller's first Broadway-produced play The Man Who Had All The Luck, and the fictional writing The Misfits. The Misfits
was made into a motion picture in 1961, starring Clark Gable and Miller's wife, Marilyn Monroe. In the introduction to
the 1961 Viking Press edition of The Misfits Arthur Miller explains that it is written in "unfamiliar form, neither novel,
play, nor screenplay."
There are two very useful companion texts for the student studying Miller's plays. The first, edited by Robert A. Martin, is
The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (New York: Viking, 1978); it includes reprints and his introductions to his own work,
interviews, and essays by Miller explaining his theories regarding theater, including his take on the "art of style." The
essays in this text also raise issues and explanations of the author's own work. The second book, Conversations with
Arthur Miller, edited by Matthew C. Roudane (Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1987), includes every printed
interview with Miller, up to 1987, in which he discusses both the craft of writing and theater, as well as his body of work.
There are ample collections of literary criticism that address selected issues in Miller's work. Students who are interested
in thematic elements including the dichotomy of strength and weakness, and forgiveness in Miller's plays are advised to
read Harold Bloom's collection of essays, Arthur Miller (New York: Chelsea House, 2003). Alice Griffin's minibiography,
Understanding Arthur Miller (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1996), is useful for its biographical sketch as well
as for its critical overviews of Miller's plays.
Miller's autobiography, Timebends (1987), provides a sketch of his experiences and their connection to the evolution of
his literary works. Students looking for a full biography of Arthur Miller's life are advised to read Arthur Miller by Martin
Gottfried (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2003).
–Jonathan Maricle
Further Information
Principal Books by Miller
Situation Normal. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1944.
Focus. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1945.
All My Sons. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947.
Death of a Salesman. New York: Viking, 1949.
The Crucible. New York: Viking, 1953.
A View from the Bridge: Two One-Act Plays. New York: Viking, 1955—includes A Memory of Two Mondays.
The Misfits. New York: Viking, 1961.
Jane's Blanket. New York: Crowell-Collier / London: Collier-Macmillan, 1963.
After the Fall. New York: Viking, 1964.
Incident at Vichy. New York: Viking, 1965.
I Don't Need You Any More: Stories. New York: Viking, 1967.
The Price. New York: Viking, 1968.
In Russia, by Miller and Inge Morath. New York: Viking, 1969.
The Creation of the World and Other Business. New York: Viking, 1973.
In the Country, by Miller and Morath. New York: Viking, 1977.
The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, edited by Robert Martin. New York: Viking, 1978.
Chinese Encounters, by Miller and Morath. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979.
Playing for Time: A Screenplay. New York: Bantam, 1981.
The American Clock. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1982.
Elegy for a Lady. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1982.
Some Kind of Love Story. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1983.
The Archbishop's Ceiling. London: Methuen, 1984; New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1985.
Salesman in Beijing, by Miller and Morath. New York: Viking, 1984.
Danger: Memory! New York: Grove, 1987—comprises I Can't Remember Anything and Clara.
Timebends: A Life. Franklin Center, Pa.: Franklin Library, 1987.
The Last Yankee. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1991.
The Ride Down Mt. Morgan. New York: Penguin, 1992.
Homely Girl: A Life. New York: Peter Blum, 1992.
Broken Glass. New York: Penguin, 1994.
Mr. Peters' Connections. New York: Penguin, 1999.
Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays 1944–2000, edited by Steven R. Centola. New York: Viking, 2000.
On Politics and the Art of Acting. New York: Viking, 2001.
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