Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller (1915–2005) was an American playwright whose socially engaged dramas include Death of a Salesman and The Crucible.

Death of a Salesman: Arthur Miller’s 1949 tragedy follows traveling salesman Willy Loman and his family’s collapse. This Pulitzer Prize-winning play is Miller’s best-known portrait of failed hopes and American success.
Harlem: A New York City neighborhood in northern Manhattan with a history shaped by migration and African American culture. Miller was born in Harlem in 1915, before his family’s finances changed during the Depression.
Marilyn Monroe: An American actor and public figure whose films include Some Like It Hot and The Misfits. Miller married Monroe in 1956 and wrote the screenplay for her final completed film, The Misfits.
McCarthyism: A period of intense anti-communist suspicion and political repression in the United States, especially during the early 1950s. The climate of accusation surrounding Miller’s career provides essential context for The Crucible.
Tennessee Williams: An American playwright whose works include A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie. Williams and Miller were leading postwar playwrights, but Williams often foregrounded poetic language and intimate psychological conflict.
The Crucible: Arthur Miller’s 1953 play dramatizes the Salem witch trials in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. Miller used the witch trials to dramatize accusation and political persecution in his own era.
Great Depression: A worldwide economic crisis beginning in 1929, marked by mass unemployment and severe hardship. The Depression damaged Miller’s family business and informed his attention to economic insecurity.
Elia Kazan: A Greek American theater and film director known for work on Broadway and in Hollywood. Kazan directed the original productions of Miller’s All My Sons and Death of a Salesman.
American realism: A literary and theatrical movement depicting ordinary life and social conditions in the United States. Miller’s family-centered tragedies helped define postwar American realist drama.
Eugene O’Neill: An American playwright whose works include Long Day’s Journey into Night and The Iceman Cometh. O’Neill’s expansive, often tragic family dramas preceded Miller’s and helped shape modern American theater.

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