Miller began working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard while continuing to write radio plays, some of which were broadcast on CBS. However, Congress, worried about possible Communist infiltration, closed the project in 1939. He chose the theater project although he had an offer to work as a scriptwriter for 20th Century Fox. After graduation, he joined the Federal Theater Project, a New Deal agency established to provide jobs in the theater. In 1938, Miller received a BA in English. In 1937, Miller wrote Honors at Dawn, which also received the Avery Hopwood Award. 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. Miller enrolled in a playwriting seminar taught by the influential Professor Kenneth Rowe, who instructed him in his early forays into playwriting Rowe emphasized how a play is built in order to achieve its intended effect, or what Miller called "the dynamics of play construction." Rowe provided realistic feedback along with much-needed encouragement, and became a lifelong friend. The award brought him his first recognition and led him to begin to consider that he could have a career as a playwright. Miller switched his major to English, and subsequently won the Avery Hopwood Award for No Villain. It was during this time that he wrote his first play, No Villain. After graduating in 1932 from Abraham Lincoln High School, he worked at several menial jobs to pay for his college tuition.Īt the University of Michigan, Miller first majored in journalism and worked as a reporter and night editor for the student paper, the Michigan Daily. As a teenager, Miller delivered bread every morning before school to help the family. In the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the family lost almost everything and moved to Gravesend, Brooklyn. The family, including his younger sister Joan, lived on East 110th Street in Manhattan and owned a summer house in Far Rockaway, Queens. His father, a mostly illiterate but moderately wealthy businessman, owned a women's clothing store employing 400 people. Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, a period during which he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Principe de Asturias Award, and was married to Marilyn Monroe.Īrthur Asher Miller was born, in Harlem, New York City, the second of three children of Isidore and Augusta Miller, Polish-Jewish immigrants. He was a prominent figure in American theatre, writing dramas that include plays such as All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), and A View from the Bridge (one-act, 1955 revised two-act, 1956). Jerusalem Prize Principe de Asturias Prize (Spain)Īrthur Asher Miller was an American playwright and essayist. Of the Arts Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize York Drama Circle Critics Award National Medal Awards-Tony Award (twice) Pulitizer Prize New.He has given us a figure whose name has become a symbol for a kind of majestic grandiosity-and a play that compresses epic extremems of humor and anguish, promise and loss, between the four walls of an American living room. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial. By contrast, his younger son, Happy, has a more traditional-albeit lackluster-career and is a womanizer.Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. He also constantly fights with his eldest son Biff, who, after dropping out of high school, has been getting by as a drifter and as an occasional thief. While at home, he dissociates from reality, entering in time switches that explain why he turned out the way he did through interactions with his brother Ben and his mistress. Fun Fact: Arthur Miller provided two alternate versions of a physical insult in the play: If Willy Loman is played by a small man (like Dustin Hoffman) he is called a "shrimp," but if the actor is large, Willy Loman is called a "walrus.”ĭeath of a Salesman is, at first glance, about the last day in the life of salesman Willy Loman, who, at 63, has failed at his career.Notable Adaptations: 1984 at the Broadhurst Theater, with Dustin Hoffman playing Willy 2012 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, with Philip Seymour Hoffman as Willy Loman.Main Characters: Willy Loman, Biff Loman, Happy Loman, Linda Loman, Ben Loman.Themes: The American dream, family relationships.Premiere Date:, at the Morosco Theatre.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |