Miller and Monroe at a press conference
after their wedding.

Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright and essayist. He was
a prominent figure in American literature and cinema for over 61 years, writing a wide variety of plays,
including celebrated plays such as The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, All My Sons, and Death of a
Salesman, which are still studied and performed worldwide. Miller was often in the public eye, most
famously for refusing to give evidence against others to the House Un-American Activities Committee, being
the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama among other awards, and for marrying Marilyn Monroe. At the
time of his death, Miller was considered one of the greatest American playwrights.

Arthur Miller was born to moderately affluent Jewish-American parents, Isidore and Augusta Miller, in
Manhattan, New York City, in 1915. His father owned a women's clothes/coat-manufacturing business, which
failed in the Wall Street Crash of 1929 after which his family moved to humbler quarters in Brooklyn.

Because of the effects of the Great Depression on his family, Miller had no money for college after
graduating in 1932 from Abraham Lincoln High School (New York). After securing a place at the University
of Michigan, he worked in a number of menial jobs to pay for his tuition.

At the University of Michigan, Miller first majored in journalism, where he became the reporter and night
editor on the student paper, the Michigan Daily. It was during this time that he wrote his first work, No
Villain. After winning the Avery Hopwood Award for No Villain, Miller switched his major to English, where
he met Professor Kenneth Rowe, who aided Miller in his early forays into playwrighting. Miller retained
strong ties to his alma mater throughout the rest of his life, establishing the university's Arthur Miller
Award in 1985 and Arthur Miller Award for Dramatic Writing in 1999, and lending his name to the Arthur
Miller Theatre in 2000. In 1937, Miller wrote Honors at Dawn, which also received the Avery Hopwood Award.

In 1944 Miller wrote The Man Who Had All the Luck, which was produced in New York and won the Theater
Guild's National Award. Despite this critical success, the play closed after only six performances. The
next few years were difficult for Miller: He published his first novel, Focus, to little acclaim and
adapted George Abbott's and John C. Holm's Three Men on a Horse for television. Things changed in 1947,
when Miller's All My Sons was produced at the Coronet Theater. The play was directed by Elia Kazan, with
whom Miller would have a continuing professional and personal relationship, and ran for three hundred and
twenty-eight performances. All My Sons won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and two Tony Awards in
1947, despite Miller receiving criticism for being a Communist.

Miller died at his home in Roxbury of congestive heart failure on the evening of February 10, 2005 (the
56th anniversary of the Broadway debut of Death of a Salesman) at the age of 89, surrounded by his family.

Miller's career as a writer spanned over seven decades, and at the time of his death in 2005, Miller was
considered to be one of the greatest dramatists of the twentieth century, among the likes of Harold
Pinter, Eugene O'Neill, Luigi Pirandello, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertolt Brecht, and Tennessee
Williams. After his death, many respected actors, directors, and producers paid tribute to Miller, some
calling him the last great practitioner of the American stage, and Broadway theaters darkened their lights
in a show of respect. Miller's alma mater, the University of Michigan opened the Arthur Miller Theatre in
March, 2007. Per his express wish, it is the only theater in the world that bears Miller's name.

Throughout his life and work, Miller has remained socially engaged and has written with conscience,
clarity, and compassion. As Chris Keller says to his mother in All My Sons, "Once and for all you must
know that there's a universe of people outside, and you're responsible to it." Miller's work is infused
with his sense of responsibility to humanity and to his audience. "The playwright is nothing without his
audience," he writes. "He is one of the audience who happens to know how to speak."