Arthur Miller

Arthur Asher Miller (New York, October 17, 1915 – Roxbury, Connecticut, February 10, 2005) was an American playwright and screenwriter and a controversial figure in American theater of the centuryXX. Among his most popular works are They were all my children (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Witches of Salem (1953) and Panorama from the Bridge (1955, revised 1956). He wrote several screenplays and was best known for his work on & # 34; The Misfits & # 34; (1961). The drama Death of a Salesman was included in the list of the best American plays of the 20th century.

Miller was often in the public eye, particularly in the late 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. During this time, he received a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee United States House of Representatives and married Marilyn Monroe. In 1980, he received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Library Associates of the University of San Luis. He received the Prince of Asturias Award, the Praemium Imperiale Award in 2002, and the Jerusalem Award in 2003, as well as the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Award, in 1999.

Biography

He was the son of a middle-class family of Polish-Jewish immigrants. His father, Isidore, owned a prosperous textile company, which allowed the family to live in Manhattan, next to Central Park. However, the Great Depression ended the family business, so the family had to move to a modest apartment in Brooklyn. This apartment would later serve as a model for the home of the protagonist of Death of a Salesman.

After high school, he worked at an auto parts store to put himself through college. He studied journalism at the University of Michigan, where he received the first of his lifetime awards, the Avery Hopwood Award, thanks to one of his early works, Honors at Dawn . In 1938, upon his graduation, he moved back to New York, where he made a living writing radio scripts.

He was married three times. On August 5, 1940 with his college sweetheart, Mary Slattery, the Catholic daughter of an insurance salesman. The couple had two children, Jane and Robert (director, writer and producer). The couple divorced in 1956. He then married Marilyn Monroe (1956-1961, divorced) and later with the press photographer Inge Morath (1962-2002, the year in which Inge died). With Inge he had two children, the second of whom, Daniel, was born in 1966 with Down syndrome and, against his mother's wishes, Miller arranged for him to be admitted in a matter of days to a public institution. Miller never spoke of this son and showed little or no interest in him. He only recognized him in his will, making him an equal heir with his three brothers. His daughter is the director, screenwriter, writer and actress Rebecca Miller married to fellow actor Daniel Day-Lewis.

The work and its meaning

At the age of 28, he premiered his first play on Broadway, the comedy A Very Lucky Man, which only ran for four performances. In 1947 he premiered Todos eran mis hijos, which remained on the billboard for almost a year and received the Critics' Award in 1948 from the New York Theater Critics Circle. In this work he denounces the cynicism of the arms companies.

From his first titles, he already reveals what would be the fundamental element of all his work: social criticism, which denounces the conservative values that were beginning to take root in United States society. His definitive consecration occurred in 1949, with Death of a Salesman , in which he denounced the illusory nature of the American dream. In 1988, Miller would declare: «I never imagined that he would acquire the proportions that he has had. It was a literal play about a salesman, but then it became a myth, not just here, but in many other parts of the world." He also affirmed: "You work all your life to buy a house, and when, finally, the house already belongs to you... there is no one who lives in it", with the same position about the consequences of capitalism. The work was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, with three Tony Awards and again with the New York Critics Award.

In the 1950s he was the victim of a witch hunt. Accused of communist sympathies by Elia Kazan, he refused to reveal the names of members of a literary circle suspected of having ties to the Communist Party before the Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956, invoking constitutional protection. Despite the pressures he suffered (his passport was withdrawn, unable to travel to Brussels to attend the premiere of one of his works), Miller did not give any names, declaring that, although he had attended meetings in 1947 and signed some manifestos He was not a communist. In May 1957 he was found guilty of contempt of Congress for refusing to reveal the names of suspected communists. However, in August 1958, the United States Court of Appeals overturned the sentence, so he did not have to go to jail.

The atmosphere of that time was captured in The crucible (The crucible, 1953). In this work he uses a real event from the XVII century to attack the witch hunt led by Senator McCarthy of which he he himself was a victim. Also in the 1950s he published Recuerdo de dos lunes (1955) and Panorama desde el puente (1955), successfully adapted to the cinema and theater and with which he obtained his second Pulitzer Prize. On June 29, 1956, he married Marilyn Monroe, a marriage that would last four and a half years.

In 1961 he wrote the script for The Misfits (Vidas rebeldes; Los misadaptados, in Argentina), written for his wife, Marilyn Monroe and made into a film by John Huston, also featuring Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable as protagonists. This would be the last film for Marilyn and Gable, both of whom died shortly after filming.

In 1964, Miller portrayed the five tormented years of his relationship with Marilyn in the controversial After the Fall, with the self-destructive character of the protagonist, Maggie. Other works of his are Incident at Vichy (1964), The Price (1968), his last critical and public success, and The Creation of the World (1972).

The 1970s ushered in a period of darkness, in which he was labeled old-fashioned, self-righteous, and preachy. In 1976 he wrote and published Focus ( En el punto de mira ), a novel that, in the words of Miller himself, was written with a certain urgency, given the anti-Semitic atmosphere, resurfaced in those moments. The protagonist of this novel is Mr. Newman, whose life changes from the day he buys a pair of glasses to improve his visibility, glasses that give him the appearance of a fifty-year-old Jew. Newman, who has fired a certain secretary with a Jewish last name, by strictly superior orders, will live firsthand the rotten fruit of racial hatred, practiced by an apparently civilized, politically correct society, but with a cruel and hypocritical background.

Miller would not come out of his relative ostracism until 1994, with the success of Broken Glass. During this period of darkness, he travels around the world, being hailed as a living classic, but finding it increasingly difficult to release it in his country.

Miller is known for his intense political and social activism. He lashed out at the dehumanization of American life; he approached Marxism, criticizing it later; he actively opposed McCarthy's witch hunts and denounced US intervention in Korea and Vietnam. He was a delegate to the 1968 Democratic convention, but ended up skeptical of the policy. As a writer, he gained the greatest success from him with the publication in 1987 of his autobiography Vueltas al tiempo .

In 1998 he wrote Mr. Peter's Connections and in 2000 he premiered it again on Broadway The Descent of Mount Morgan, written in 1991 and for which it took him ten years to find a suitable production. Much of her work is accessible in Spanish.

He received the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in 2002. In that same year his new work Resurrection Blues premiered and new productions of The Man Who Had All” were performed in New York the Luck and The Crucible. In 2004 he premiered his last work Finishing the Picture and it was revived After the Fall.

Awards

Oscars

Works