Arthur Miller was born in was born in New York City on October 17, 1915 to Isidore and Augusta Miller. At the time, Miller's father owned a successful clothing business and the family lived in a Harlem neighborhood. In 1929, the family business failed as a result of the depression and moved to Brooklyn. Arthur Miller (1995) is a non-fiction biography by British author Christopher Bigsby. Best known for writing Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, Arthur Miller is widely considered one of the finest playwrights of the twentieth century.As a close friend and student of Miller's, Bigsby is uniquely well-suited to crafting the definitive biography of his former teacher. Arthur Miller Summary. Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Plot Summary of “Arthur Miller” by Christopher Bigsby. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics. Mar 21, 2018 Arthur Miller is considered one of the greatest American playwrights of the 20th century. His best-known plays include 'All My Sons,' 'The Crucible' and the Pulitzer Prize-winning 'Death of a.

1. Arthur Miller The Price Summary
2. Arthur Miller's The Price Summary

Arthur Miller The Price Summary

DEATH OF A SALESMAN: FREE NOTES / BOOK SUMMARY

THEMES

Major Theme

The falsity of the American Dream is the dominant theme of Arthur Miller's play. Willy Loman represents the primary target of this dream. Like most middle-class working men, he struggles to provide financial security for his family and dreams about making himself a huge financial success. After years of working as a traveling salesman, Willy Loman has only an old car, an empty house, and a defeated spirit. Miller chose the job of salesman carefully for his American Dreamer. A salesman does not make his/her own product, has not mastered a particular skill or a body of knowledge, and works on the empty substance of dreams and promises. Additionally, a salesman must sell his/her personality as much as his/her product. Willy Loman falsely believes he needs nothing more than to be well liked to make it big.

Minor Theme

The tragedy of the dysfunctional family, which helps to keep the American Dream alive, is a second important theme of Miller's play. Linda and Happy especially work very hard to keep the fantasy of the dream of success alive. In the dysfunctional Loman family, the wife is restricted to the role of housekeeping and bolstering her husband's sense of self-importance and purpose. A contradictory role given to her is that of the family's financial manager. In effect, Linda juggles the difficult realities of a working class family while making her husband believe that his income is better than adequate. Willy attempts to provide financial security and to guide his sons' future, neither of which he does very well. Unlike the myth of economic mobility in America, the vast majority of people in the working class stay in the working class generation after generation. However, the myth is what Willy Loman lives on. Unfortunately, his illusions do not fit his reality. Finally, the only solution to providing for his family is to kill himself so that they can collect on his life insurance.

MOOD

The mood is uncomfortably false and depressing throughout the play. The audience is always aware of the family’s trying to keep the truth from one another. The failure of the American Dream is ever present and makes the audience question its own commitment to false dreams.

Arthur Miller - BIOGRAPHY

Arthur Miller was born in New York City on October 17, 1915. His father, Isadore Miller, was prosperous as a shop owner and a manufacturer of women’s coats; however, he lost his fortune in the stock market crash of 1929. The young Miller was forced to work a number of odd jobs to support himself, including being a farm hand. The years after the Depression were formative years for Miller, during which the formerly indifferent student began reading on his own and developing a strong social conscience and sense of justice. He eventually entered the University of Michigan, where he began writing plays and worked on the college newspaper. After graduating in 1938, he moved back to New York, where he continued writing, primarily dramas.

Arthur Miller’s plays met with great success. The Man Who Had All the Luck, produced in 1944, won a prize offered by New York City's Theatre Guild. His first major success, however, came in 1947 with All My Sons, which won a Drama Critics Circle Award and was made into a film the following year. Death of a Salesman, Miller's most famous work produced in 1949, won a Pulitzer Prize and was made into a film in 1952. Death of a Salesman casts a cold eye on the American Dream and the moral compromises necessary to achieve it. Its hero, the hapless salesman Willy Loman, is a man struggling to make sense of his place in a society that has chewed him up and is preparing to spit him out. The Crucible, a Tony Award winning play produced in 1953, is one of Miller’s finest works, which also shows the playwright’s strong social conscience. Set during the Salem witch trials at the end of the 17th century, it is written as a critique of the extremes and evils of McCarthyism. The play offers a vision of a society consumed by paranoia, in which the age-old problem of doing good in the face of evil becomes a matter of life and death.

Miller's political activities in the 1950’s led him to be called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956. Like Proctor, the protagonist of The Crucible, he refused to testify against his friends and associates. He was convicted of contempt, but this ruling was later overturned on appeal. After the investigation, Miller continued to be politically active. In 1965, he was elected president of PEN, an international organization of writers dedicated toward world peace and free expression.

Miller has been married three times. He married Mary Grace Slattery in 1940. They had two children, Robert and Jane, before their divorce in 1955. Miller next married Marilyn Monroe in 1956. They were divorced in 1961, following the filming of The Misfits, for which he wrote the screenplay and in which she starred. In 1962 he married the photographer Inge Morath. They have one child, Rebecca Miller, who is an actress.

Miller's works are known for their strong commitment to social justice, their concern for the ordinary person, and their intricate explorations of the inner lives of their characters. Other plays by Miller include A View from the Bridge (1955), After the Fall (1964), Incident at Vichy (1964), The Price (1968), The American Clock (1980), and The Last Yankee (1993). He has also written several travel narratives and a novel. His autobiography, Timebends: A Life, was published in 1987.

Miller continued to be active in the arts and to receive accolades. He won a Kennedy Center award for lifetime achievement in the arts in 1984, and in 1993 he received the National Medal of the Arts from President Clinton. Broken Glass, published in 1994 and written for his late father, received the 1995 Oliver award.

On February 10, 2005, Miller died of congestive heart failure at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut at the age of 89. The date of his death happened to be the 56th anniversary of the Broadway opening of “Death of a Salesman”.

Arthur Miller's The Price Summary

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

As a dramatist, Miller has more in common with Ibsen, Shaw, Chekov, and Brecht than with his fellow American playwrights, Eugene O'Neil or Thornton Wilder. With Ibsen, Shaw, and Chekov, Miller shares in common the philosophy that the fate of a person is social and that the stage should be considered as a medium more important for ideas than for mere entertainment. As a dramatist, Miller is a moralist, and his plays have a serious intellectual purpose.

The theater of twentieth century America took a long time to come of age. No American dramatist in the early 1900’s dared to experiment with subjects, ideas, or production techniques because theatre was regarded as business. Slowly, in response to the plays of European realistic dramatists, American theater began to change. The years between the end of World War I and the beginning of the Depression saw more frequent reflections of economic problems on the American stage. In 1922, Eugene O'Neill's Hairy Ape represented the psychological defeat of an uncouth proletarian struggling to adjust himself to a complex economic order which he could not understand. Maxwell Anderson's play What Price Glory (1924) dealt with the bitter realities of war and its aftermath.

After World War II, the theatre of social protest fell into disrepute. Senator McCarthy succeeded in suppressing critical dissent and created a climate hostile to the free expression of the artist. During this period, the American theater concentrated on light comedy and lush musicals. Arthur Miller, born in 1915, was a young adult at the time of the suppression of free thinking. He decided to fight McCarthyism and to work for the expression of free ideas in the theatre. He also decided to write plays of social protest. In Death of a Salesman (1949), Miller criticizes the falsity of the American Dream and the emphasis placed on financial success in the United States.

In the period immediately following the end of World War II, American theater was transformed by the work of playwright Arthur Miller. Profoundly influenced by the Depression and the war that immediately followed it, Miller tapped into a sense of dissatisfaction and unrest within the greater American psyche. His probing dramas proved to be both the conscience and redemption of the times, allowing people an honest view of the direction the country had taken.

Arthur Miller was born in Manhattan in 1915 to Jewish immigrant parents. By 1928, the family had moved to Brooklyn, after their garment manufacturing business began to fail. Witnessing the societal decay of the Depression and his father’s desperation due to business failures had an enormous effect on Miller. After graduating from high school, Miller worked a number of jobs and saved up the money for college. In 1934, he enrolled in the University of Michigan and spent much of the next four years learning to write and working on a number of well-received plays.

After graduating, Miller returned to New York, where he worked as a freelance writer. In 1944, his first play, “The Man Who Had All the Luck”, opened to horrible reviews. A story about an incredibly successful man who is unhappy with that success, “The Man Who Had All The Luck” was already addressing the major themes of Miller’s later work. In 1945, Miller published a novel, FOCUS, and two years later had his first play on Broadway. “All My Sons,” a tragedy about a manufacturer who sells faulty parts to the military in order to save his business, was an instant success. Concerned with morality in the face of desperation, “All My Sons” appealed to a nation having recently gone through both a war and a depression.

Only two years after the success of “All My Sons,” Miller came out with his most famous and well-respected work, “Death of a Salesman.” Dealing again with both desperation and paternal responsibility, “Death of a Salesman” focused on a failed businessman as he tries to remember and reconstruct his life. Eventually killing himself to leave his son insurance money, the salesman seems a tragic character out of Shakespeare or Dostoevsky. Winning both a Pulitzer Prize and a Drama Critics Circle Award, the play ran for more than 700 performances. Within a short while, it had been translated into over a dozen languages and had made its author a millionaire.

Overwhelmed by post-war paranoia and intolerance, Miller began work on the third of his major plays. Though it was clearly an indictment of the McCarthyism of the early 1950s, “The Crucible” was set in Salem during the witch-hunts of the late 17th century. The play, which deals with extraordinary tragedy in ordinary lives, expanded Miller’s voice and his concern for the physical and psychological wellbeing of the working class. Within three years, Miller was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and convicted of contempt of Congress for not cooperating. A difficult time in his life, Miller ended a short and turbulent marriage with actress Marilyn Monroe. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote very little of note, concentrating at first on issues of guilt over the Holocaust, and later moving into comedies.

It was not until the 1991 productions of his “The Ride Down Mount Morgan” and “The Last Yankee” that Miller’s career began to see a resurgence. Both plays returned to the themes of success and failure that he had dealt with in earlier works. Concerning himself with the American dream, and the average American’s pursuit of it, Miller recognized a link between the poverty of the 1920s and the wealth of the 1980s. Encouraged by the success of these works, a number of his earlier pieces returned to the stage for revival performances.

More than any other playwright working today, Arthur Miller has dedicated himself to the investigation of the moral plight of the white American working class. With a sense of realism and a strong ear for the American vernacular, Miller has created characters whose voices are an important part of the American landscape. His insight into the psychology of desperation and his ability to create stories that express the deepest meanings of struggle, have made him one of the most highly regarded and widely performed American playwrights. In his eighty-fifth year, Miller remains an active and important part of American theater.