Arthur Miller, one of the greatest playwrights in America who died at the age of 89, has been a prolific and popular writer for 7 decades. In Death Of A Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953), he created two of the most enduring tragic myths of the century, and in Timebends (1987), one of its outstanding autobiographies. When he married Marilyn Monroe at the height of her fame in 1956, he had walked his own life into the glare of living myth.
Arthur Miller Early Life
Initially Miller was born in Harlem , New York. Both Jewish grandfathers came from the same Polish hamlet; at the age of six, his father, Isidore-lzzie-was sent by himself from Radomizi to New York relatives and became a manhattan rag trade prince. He had the good sense to marry in the depression destroyed the sassy and stunning Augusta Barnett (Gussie), who was far smarter than him.
Arthur was closer to his mother but tender to the memory of both parents and in most of the works their spirit, determination, and deceit are evident. He once said that everything he 'd written was based on someone he'd seen or met and while Death Of A Salesman isn't purely autobiographical, it's hard to imagine without the lives of Izzie and Gussie Miller.
The Millers had left Harlem in the early 1920s for Brooklyn. Usually Arthur, their second son and middle child, proceeded to crash through a suburban American boyhood baseball, biking, crooning, football-until Wall Street. He is 14 years old. Much of his work influences the first major discord of the American century. Unlike Dickens and Ibsen, he drew from his father's financial tragedy the lifelong convictions that catastrophe could hit without notice, and that the crust of civilized order was becoming ever thinner. Earlier, Miller would ridicule the nostalgic notion of American poverty as a golden age of good neighborliness- "Was everyone your friend? Horseshit!
Arthur Miller Education
He went to Michigan University in 1934, Ann Arbor, where he became a student journalist, wrote his first novel, No Villain, and three other titles representing the gathering of the global melodrama of the time: They Too Arise, Honors At Dawn, and The Great Disobedience. He received a $1,250 award from New Plays Bureau operated by New York producers The Theater Guild.
Miller's graduation in 1938 coincided with a rare moment of generous U.S. government funding for the arts, and he joined the Federal Theater Project (FTP) at $22.77 a week. Created in 1935 by Roosevelt 's work-creation program, the FTP 's aim was to provide employment for the theater industry's unemployed. Congress killed it in 1939, believing it had become too left-wing; but in its short li, the FTP 's aim was to provide employment for those who were unemployed.
What Was Arthur Miller Known For
In 1940, Miller ended The Golden Years, a confrontational drama between Cortez and Montezuma. The script, mislaid by the Theater Guild, appeared at the University of Texas several years later and was premiered on Radio Three at the BBC in 1987. Today, it reads like a cross between an epic Hollywood costume and an opera libretto in translation; but the subject of genocide in Mexico in the 16th century set a pattern in Miller 's career, often choosing to write about the horrors of the 20th century at one point. The real stories behind The Golden Years were the Guernica bombing and the fascist appeasement.
In the Second World War a college football injury forced him out of active service. He worked on a training film for the army, wrote for the radio, drove a truck, published an anti-semitism novel and became a fitter at the Brooklyn navy yard. Miller was the type of writer to whom no experience was wasted: just as the navy yard appeared years later in A View From The Bridge (1955), so a nightmare visit to see Václav Havel in 1969, in the wake of the Prague Spring, inspired one of Miller's most tensely wounded later plays, The Archbishop's Ceiling (1977).
Finally in 1944 he made Broadway, with The Man Who Had All The Luck, a hubristically named fable that closed after four performances. However, the play is significant, because it is the first attempt by Miller to mix the disciplines of suburban tragedy, folk realism and ironic farce. It draws on a beautiful heritage of family and neighborhood stories from Brooklyn and flags up a theme that resurfaces throughout his work: personal honor.
Arthur Miller in Authorship Journey
Arthur Miller had written many kinds of theater out of his system by the end of the Second World War and was able to figure out the mood of the time for some purpose. What will it be like for America? His response has been a play that can still deliver an emotional knock-out, and has become his first hit. Opening at the Coronet Theatre on January 29, 1947, directed by Elia Kazan and featuring Ed Begley, Beth Merrill, Karl Malden and Arthur Kennedy, All My Sons ran for 328 performances-a good length for an unfamiliar playwright, and one that he rarely surpassed.
Arthur Miller in Broadway Theater
That was a new Broadway and it was a watershed show for All My Sons. Eighteen months after the V-J Day euphoria, the audience was ready for what would be a back-from-the-war match. It exploded in the pause between victory and the attempted press-ganging of show business for the cold war in Washington, a family tale of corrupt profiteering at home which led to the death of US pilots abroad. From this point on, the best scenes of Miller show a conversational mastery, a knack for sketching dynamic characters on the margins of a story, and a dramatic talent for catching the attention of the viewer from the outset.
The 1940s and 1950s Broadway Theater, in which Miller and Tennessee Williams made their name, was a public tribune led by spectacular performers, directors, artists and writers: Kazan, Eugene O'Neill, William Inge, designer Jo Mielziner, actors like Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, and Lee J Cobb. The tribune was graced by the American musical's golden age which ran alongside it, and a highly attentive press attended. Subtitled Certain Private Conversations In Two Acts And A Requiem, Death Of A Salesman opened at the Morosco Theater on February 10, 1949, playing for 742 performances: it was Miller's greatest success in his career and has recently enjoyed a revival on Broadway, due to be transferred to London in May.
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