In 1956, Miller made international headlines when he and his first wife were divorced and he married Marilyn Monroe, the sex-goddess symbol of her time. He was inevitably sought out again for movie writing in Hollywood, but he refused this time. In 1944, Miller won a Theatre Guild prize of $1,250 awarded for the most promising unproduced playwright, and 1945 brought his first Broadway production, a play called The Man Who Had All the Luck, which had little luck, running barely a week. He soon began writing radio scripts, which brought him to the attention of Hollywood, where he was assigned to write several movies, among them the Academy Award winning How Green Was My Valley and The Story of G.I. For years after he attained play-writing fame and fortune he liked to spend a few weeks each year working in a factory because, by “standing eight hours a day at a machine in one place, you know what it’s about.” He entered the University of Michigan and at various times earned money as a truck-driver, waiter, and crewman on a tanker. When he graduated from high school during the depression of the early 1930s, he worked for two years at $15 a week in an auto parts warehouse to earn enough money to go to college. The playwright-to-be was a high school football hero in Brooklyn (an experience he later incorporated into Death of a Salesman).

Miller was born in New York City in 1915. The promise he showed then was more than fulfilled two years later with his overwhelming American tragedy, Death of a Salesman-which made a clean sweep in 1949 by winning both another New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Ever since he won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award in 1947 for his second-produced play, All My Sons, Arthur Miller has been counted one of the most gifted playwrights on the American scene.

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