Here is the biography of Arthur Miller:
Arthur Asher Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in New York City, to Augusta (nee Barnett) and Isidore Miller. His family was of Austrian Jewish descent. His father manufactured women's coats, but his business was devastated by the Depression, seeding his son's disillusionment with the American Dream.
Miller had to work for tuition money to attend the University of Michigan, where he wrote his first plays. They were successful, earning him numerous student awards, including the Avery Hopwood Award in Drama for "No Villain" in 1937.
Miller's star became ascendant in 1947 with his play "All My Sons", directed by Elia Kazan, which became a hit on Broadway, running for 328 performances. Both Miller and Kazan received Tony Awards, and Miller won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award.
Miller's most famous play is "Death of a Salesman", which opened at the Morosco Theatre on February 10, 1949, and closed 742 performances later on November 18, 1950. The play was the sensation of the season, winning six Tony Awards, including Best Play and Best Author for Miller. Miller also was awarded the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Miller married his college girlfriend, Mary Grace Slattery, in 1940; they would have two children, Joan and Robert. He made his Broadway debut with "The Man Who Had All the Luck" in 1944, a flop that lasted only four performances.
In 1956, Miller divorced his first wife, Mary Slattery Miller, and married movie siren-cum-legend Marilyn Monroe. With this marriage, Miller achieved a different type of fame, a pop culture status he abhorred. The marriage was doomed to fail, as Monroe was "highly self-destructive".
Miller's personal life was marked by controversy, including his refusal to name names of a literacy circle suspected of Communist Party affiliations, which led to his being found in contempt of Congress in 1957. He became a left-wing cause célèbre and was deprived of his passport.
Miller continued to write plays, including "The Price", which ran for 429 performances between February 7, 1968, and February 15, 1969. Though Miller won a 1968 Tony Award for Best Play, the bulk of his success as an original playwright was over.
In the 1980s, when Miller was hailed as the greatest living American playwright after the death of Tennessee Williams, he even had trouble getting full-scale revivals of his work staged. One of his most significant later works, "The American Clock", based on Studs Terkel's oral history of the Great Depression, "Hard Times", ran for only 11 previews and 12 performances in late 1980 at the Biltmore Theatre.
Arthur Miller died in Roxbury, Connecticut, in 2005, aged 89, after suffering from cancer, pneumonia, and a heart condition.
