Arthur Miller The Price Summary Full Year On

He is through. The phantom of his life has caught up with him.

Hes the enemy. And if you cant live like that, you dont stay.

Its tough. Hes got to be able to take a whack, and hes got to swallow bicycles and digest them.

The mission of the theater, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities.

A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from.

His best-known plays include All My Sons, The Crucible and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Death of a Salesman.

Who Was Arthur Miller Playwright Arthur Miller attended the University of Michigan before moving back East to write dramas for the stage.

He earned widespread praise for Death of a Salesman, which opened on Broadway in 1949 and won the Pulitzer Prize along with multiple Tonys.

Millers public life was painted in part by his rocky marriage to Hollywood sex symbol Marilyn Monroe.

Early Life and Education Miller was born in Harlem, New York, on October 17, 1915, to an immigrant family of Polish and Jewish descent.

His father, Isidore, owned a successful coat manufacturing business, and his mother, Augusta, to whom he was closer, was an educator and an avid reader of novels.

The affluent Miller family lost almost everything in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and had to move from Manhattan to Flatbush, Brooklyn.

After graduating high school, Miller worked a few odd jobs to save enough money to attend the University of Michigan.

While in college, he wrote for the student paper and completed his first play, No Villain, for which he won the schools Avery Hopwood Award.

He also took courses with playwright and professor Kenneth Rowe.

Early Career Death of a Salesman Millers career got off to a rocky start.

His 1944 Broadway debut, The Man Who Had All the Luck, garnered a fate that was the antithesis of its title, closing after just four performances with a stack of woeful reviews.

Arthur Miller The Price Summary Full Year On

His next play, All My Sons, was a hit in 1947, running for almost a full year on Broadway and earning Miller his first Tony Award for Best Author.

Working in a small studio that he built in Roxbury, Connecticut, Miller wrote the first act of Death of a Salesman in less than a day.

The play, directed by Elia Kazan, opened on February 10, 1949, at the Morosco Theatre, and was adored by nearly everyone, becoming an iconic stage work.

The drama follows the travails of Willy Loman, an aging Brooklyn salesman whose career is in decline and who finds the values that he so doggedly pursued have become his undoing.

New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson described Willy Loman in his 1949 review of the play: In his early sixties he knows his business as well as he ever did.

But the unsubstantial things have become decisive; the spring has gone from his step, the smile from his face and the heartiness from his personality.