P a g e | 1 Paper 05; Module 28; E Text (A) Personal Details Role Name Affiliation Principal Investigator Prof. Tutun University of Hyderabad Mukherjee Paper Coordinator Prof. Niladri University of Kalyani, West Chatterjee Bengal. Content Writer/Author Ms. Monikinkini Bhawanipore Education Society (CW) Basu Content Reviewer (CR) Prof. Niladri University of Kalyani, West Chatterjee Bengal. Language Editor (LE) Prof. Sharmila University of Kalyani, West Majumdar Bengal. (B) Description of Module Item Description of module Subject Name English Paper name American Literature Module title Aurthur Miller: The Death of a Salesman Module ID MODULE 28 P a g e | 2 Arthur Miller This module contains the life and works of the famous American playwright, Arthur Miller and a special mention of his most famous play Death of a Salesman. Introduction: Born on 17 October 1915, Arthur Miller was a playwright, essayist and activist of the American Theatre movement. Miller was a public figure and had composed plays like All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953) and A View from the Bridge (1955, revised 1956). He also wrote screenplays and was most noteworthy for his work, The Misfits (1961). His play, Death of a Salesman is often placed as a part of the the finest American plays in the 20th century alongside Long Day's Journey into Night and A Streetcar Named Desire. He was the winner of Pulitzer Prize for Literature; Miller was one of the most prominent and promising figures of American English Literature. Life: Arthur Asher Miller’s birthplace was in Harlem, in the New York City borough of Manhattan, and he was the second of the three children of Augusta and Isadora Miller. His father was an Austrian Jewish immigrant, and his mother was from New York, born to Austrian Jewish parents. His father owned a women's clothing manufacturing business. He was a wealthy and respected man in the community. In the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the family lost almost everything and moved to Gravesend, Brooklyn. As a teenager, Miller worked as a bread delivery boy before school to contribute to his family’s economy. After graduating in 1932 from Abraham Lincoln High School, he worked regularly to pay his college fees. He then joined the University of Michigan, where he first majored in journalism and worked for the student paper, the Michigan Daily. During this time he wrote his first play, No Villain. Miller changed his major to English, and eventually won the Avery P a g e | 3 Hopwood Award for No Villain. The award brought him instant recognition and led him into considering that he could have a career option as a playwright. Miller enrolled in a playwriting course which was taught by Professor Kenneth Rowe, who instructed him in his early forays into playwriting; Rowe emphasized how a play is built in so as to achieve its intended effect, or what Miller called "the dynamics of play construction". Miller retained strong ties to his alma mater throughout the rest of his life. He had established the university's Arthur Miller Award in 1985 and Arthur Miller Award for Dramatic Writing in 1999, and lent his name to the Arthur Miller Theatre in 2000. In 1937, Miller wrote Honors at Dawn, which received the Avery Hopwood Award. After his graduation in 1938, he joined the Federal Theater Project, a New Deal agency established to provide jobs in the theatre. He chose the theatre project against the more lucrative offer to work as a scriptwriter for 20th Century Fox. However, Congress, was worried about possible Communist infiltration, and therefore closed the project in 1939. Miller began working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard while continuing to write his radio plays. He was married to Mary Grace Slattery in 1940.The couple had two children, Jane and Robert. 1940 was also the year his first play was produced; The Man Who Had All the Luck won the Theatre Guild's National Award. In 1947, Miller's play All My Sons, was a success on Broadway, this earned him his first Tony Award, for Best Author, and his reputation as a playwright was established even further. Years later, in a 1994 interview with Ron Rifkin, Miller confessed that most contemporary critics regarded All My Sons as "a very depressing play in a time of great optimism" and that positive reviews from Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times had saved it from doom. In the year 1948, Miller built a small studio in Roxbury, Connecticut. There, he wrote Act I of Death of a Salesman within one single day. Within six weeks, he completed the rest of the play, which proceeded to become one of the classics of world theatre. Death of a P a g e | 4 Salesman had premiered on Broadway on February 10, 1949 at the Morocco Theatre, directed by Elia Kazan. The play was both a commercially successful and a critically acclaimed play, winning a Tony Award for Best Author, the New York Drama Circle Critics' Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was the first play to win all three of these major awards. The play was performed 742 times. In 1949, Miller exchanged letters with Eugene O'Neill regarding Miller's production of All My Sons. O'Neill had sent Miller a congratulatory telegram; in response, he wrote a letter that consisted of a few paragraphs detailing his gratitude for the telegram, apologizing for not responding earlier, and inviting Eugene to the opening of Death of a Salesman. A one-act version of Miller's verse drama, A View from the Bridge opened on Broadway in a joint bill with one of Miller's lesser-known plays, A Memory of Two Mondays, in 1956. The very next year, Miller revised A View from the Bridge as a two-act prose drama, which Peter Brook directed in London. A French-Italian joint-production called Vu du pont, based on the play, was released in 1962. In June 1956, marked another event in his personal life, Miller left his first wife Mary Slattery and was married to Marilyn Monroe. Miller and Monroe had met in April 23, 1951, when they had been in a relationship, and had remained in contact since then. Miller began work on The Misfits, starring his wife, Monroe. Miller later said that the filming was one of the lowest points in his life; shortly before the film's premiere in 1961, they divorced. One and a half year later, Monroe died of what seemed to be a possible drug overdose. Inge Morath who worked as a photographer documenting the film's production was Miller's future wife. The film proved to be the last appearances for Monroe. Miller married photographer Inge Morath on February 17, 1962 and the first of their two children, Rebecca, P a g e | 5 was born in September, 1962. Their son Daniel was born with Down syndrome in November 1966. The couple remained together until Inge died in 2002. After the Fall which was produced in 1964 is said to be an account of the personal views of Miller's experiences during his marriage to Monroe. The play reunited Miller with his former friend Kazan and they collaborated on both the script and the direction. After the Fall opened on January 23, 1964 at the ANTA Theatre in Washington Square Park. That same year, Miller produced another play Incident at Vichy. A year later, Miller organized the 1966 PEN congress in New York City. Miller also wrote the penetrating family drama, The Price, produced in 1968. It was Miller's most successful play preceded only by his most successful creation, Death of a Salesman. Throughout the 1970s, Miller spent much of his time trying different genres of theatre, producing one-act plays such as Fame and The Reason Why, and travelling with his wife, he created In The Country and Chinese Encounters while travelling with her. Both his 1972 comedy The Creation of the World and Other Business and its musical adaptation, Up from Paradise, were critical and unpopular failures. Miller was an unusually articulate critique of his own work. In 1978 he published a collection of his essays on theatre called, Theater Essays, edited by Robert A. Martin and with a foreword by Miller. Highlights of the collection included Miller's introduction to his Collected Plays, his reflections on the theory of tragedy, opinion on the McCarthy Era, and pieces arguing for a publicly supported theatre. Miller travelled to China in 1983, to produce and direct Death of a Salesman at the People's Art Theatre in Beijing. The play succeeded in China and in 1984, Salesman in Beijing, a book about Miller's experiences in Beijing, had been published. Simultaneously, Death of a Salesman was adapted into the realm of telefilms. In late 1987, Miller published his P a g e | 6 autobiography, Time-bends. Before the publication of the same, it was well anticipated that Miller would not talk about Monroe in interviews; in Time-bends Miller discloses his experiences with Monroe in detail. During the first half of 1990s, Miller composed three new plays: The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1992), and Broken Glass (1994). In 1996, a film version of The Crucible was made. Miller himself was the writer of the film’s screenplay. Mr. Peters' Connections was staged Off-Broadway, and Death of a Salesman was revived on Broadway in 1998 and 1999 respectively. The play, once again, was critically acclaimed, and won a Tony Award for best revived play.