Arthur Miller Plan

The remarkable contribution of Auther Miller to English literature
Miller was a fan of experimentation, and this is evident even in the stage directions that he added to his plays. These differ greatly from the classical tradition which popularised brevity. The stage directions by Arthur Miller often provide the social and political context, and underscore valuable insights related to the text itself.
Arthur Miller has one of the largest bodies of work in American theater. His work consists of twenty dramas (full-length) as well as many one-act plays.
The Crucible is perhaps Miller's most successful play due to the number of times that it has been produced for the stage since 1953. The play is based on the infamous Salem witch trials in American history which sentenced innocent people to death without the backing of proper evidence. The witch trials of Salem took place in the year 1692 but they continue to act as a moral and judicial failing. In the play, a group of young girls, under the leadership of one Abigail, choose to accuse the members of their town of witchcraft. This leads to a witchhunt, where several innocent people were sentenced to death. The story follows that if the accused were to accept or confess to witchcraft, or even state the names of others who practised the same, they would be released. Many succumbed to this, falsely alleging that their neighbours were at fault. Others chose to die rather than concoct stories which could potentially kill town members.
The Crucible also serves as an allegory of the suspicion against communism (a political belief that caused a lot of controversy in Miller's career, including a fall out with Elia Kazan and a subpoena form) as well as McCarthyism.
Enumerated in the list of the finest American plays of the twentieth century, Death of a Salesman was premiered in 1949. This play narrates the story of Willy Loman, and plays with the theme of illusion versus reality. Based on the forever elusive American dream, like Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Death of a Salesman won Miller the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama as well as the Tony Award for Best Play. The story follows the memories of Loman and his disappointment in life. Death of a Salesman was also adapted for cinematic productions and has been produced in China, the details of which can be found in Miller's work "Salesman" in Beijing, published in 1984. Julia Keller, a critic at the Chicago Tribune, wrote about the play:
"Even if you don't know Willy Loman from Willie Nelson, you're living in a world shaped by Salesman, shaped by its rhythms and its difficult truths, shaped by its pains…. If what Miller wrote seems….a bit obvious and shopworn and melodramatic, it's because we have so completely absorbed what he taught us."
Arthur Miller's career transcended literature and was esteemed in the film industry of America. Miller wrote several screenplays, The Misfits (1961) being one of them, initially penned as a present for wife Marilyn Monroe. The film stars Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift in leading roles.
The story follows three cowboys - Guido, Gay and Perce, and their attempts at drowning out their disappointments by indulging in vices. The film was based on a short story penned by Miller of the same name, in 1957, according to Presence, Collected Short Stories published by Bloomsbury in 2009.
A businessman, Joe Keller, found success by selling the parts of airplanes during the World War II. Keller does not want his business to dwindle. Out of this greed, he deliberately chooses to sell faulty airplanes which results in the death of twenty one pilots. The play, written in three acts, became Miller's first succesful play, and was produced in Broadway. He writes, in his book Collected Plays:
"The audience sat in silence before the unwinding of All My Sons and gasped when they should have, and I tasted that power which is reserved, I imagine, for playwrights, which is to know that by one's invention a mass of strangers has been publicly transfixed."
This is a one-act play which highlights the financial difficulties that the Great Depression induced, drawn from the personal experience of Arthur Miller. In the original production, A Memory of Two Mondays was produced with another one act play by Miller, titled A View From the Bridge. The play acts as an insight into the mores of the years following the Great Depression and the socio-economic activities. The Great Depression led to mass unemployment in America which is portrayed in A Memory of Two Mondays. The story follows the eighteen year old teenager Bert who views people through a compassionate lens, for he realises how everyone has been affected by the economic crisis, some perhaps more so than his condition. The first Monday commences when Hitler rose to power in Germany, something that everyone but Bert is ignorant about. It ends on the Monday before Bert leaves his job.
It is now a thinly veiled secret that the play After the Fall was based upon Arthur Miller's marriage to Marilyn Monroe. The drama focuses on conflicts arising due to psychological tensions and has been criticised by many as an act which tarnishes the image of Marilyn Monroe while simultaneously portraying Miller as a man who damaged. Maggie, the female protagonist is a beautiful woman. However, she is also going through mental health problems. The story takes place in Quentin's mind, who ponders on whether to marry the woman he loves, that is, Holga. The play is nonlinear in its narrative structure, like memory or a desultory train of thought which makes it difficult to understand at times. It has also received criticism owing to the portrayal of Marilyn Monroe, following which, he allegedly fell out of favour with Jackie Kennedy, as written in Sarah Bradford's biography based on Jackie's life.
Miller also translated and adapted the play, 'An Enemy of the People', which was originally penned by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. While remaining mostly faithful, Miller's version gives way to a more subtle tone as opposed to Ibsen. The play's protagonist is a doctor, Thomas Stockmann, who is ostracized by the society of his community. The reason being - Stockmann refuses to back down from his attack on the decision of the town to hide facts regarding the toxic levels of the spa water. This poses as serious threats to any tourist which otherwise could bring down the numbers of tourists visiting the region. As with all Ibsen dramas, this too holds a mirror to the morality and actions of people.
As Henrik Ibsen served an inspiration, needless to find family dramas in Miller's repertoire. The Price (1968) was one such family drama that acts as a reflection of societal issues. The story follows a policeman who needs to go through the inventory of his late father's possessions. The play was written in 1967 and takes place in two parts. A conversation about such mundane things as furniture takes place between the characters, under the garb of which the relations between family members are revealed. It is a memory play, written and produced in the mid-career years of Miller.
Racial prejudice against Jews lies at the core of Arthur Miller's only novel, Focus, which was published in the year 1945. It revolves around Lawrence Newman who is an anti-semitic character. He is prejudiced against the minority section. Miller uses the backdrop of a corporate set up to highlight the prevalent racism. Newman is a HR and his office is racist. However, this starts bothering Newman when he starts wearing spectacles, thus making him look like a Jew. This change pushes him to the lower strata of hierarchy, at the receiving end of contempt and discrimination.
Arthur Miller has also written several essays which outline both his politics and views on plays. It has been said that Miller was one of the best critics of his own work. This is why his essays also work as a commentary on his creations. He also published several non fiction books based on such eclectic experiences as the Chinese stage production of Death of a Salesman, his travel in Roxbury, Connecticut, research on Ernie Pyle, among others.
Miller's autobiography, Timebends: A Life (1987) enumerates the key milestones in his career, his life as a young boy in Harlem, his three marriages as well as the connections he had with Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, John F. Kennedy and Mikhail Gorbachev.
In literature, like in any other art form, originality counts as genius (let's skip Shakespeare's plagiarism for the moment here) and Miller's originality and creativity has helped him develop a unique literary voice in American literature. As was evident through his rendition of Death of a Salesman in China, his works seem to be relevant across borders of culture and territory. Miller died of on the evening of 10th February but his legacy lives in his literary career and his foundation. Today, his plays have featured some of the greatest actors of the world, including Saoirse Ronan.
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 school's Avery Hopwood Award. He also took courses with playwright and professor Kenneth Rowe. Inspired by Rowe's approach, Miller moved back East to begin his career as a playwright.
Miller's 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. Focus, Miller's novel about anti-Semitism, was published a year later. 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. He is through. The phantom of his life has caught up with him. As literally as Mr. Miller can say it, dust returns to dust. Suddenly there is nothing."
Salesman won Miller the highest accolades in the theater world: the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Tony for Best Play. (The work, in fact, swept all of the six Tony categories in which it was nominated, including for Best Direction and Best Author.) 
In 1956, Miller divorced his first wife, Mary Slattery, his former college sweetheart with whom he had two children, Jane Ellen and Robert. Less than a month later, Miller married actress and Hollywood sex symbol Marilyn Monroe, whom he'd first met in 1951 at a Hollywood party. At the time, Monroe was dating Kazan, who had directed Miller's All My Sons and Death of a Salesman. When Kazan asked Miller to keep Monroe company while he dated another actress, Miller and Monroe struck up a friendship that turned into a romance. Author Norman Mailer called their marriage the union of "the Great American Brain" and "the Great American Body."
Miller and Monroe's high-profile marriage placed the playwright in the Hollywood spotlight. At the time of their marriage, he told the press that Monroe would curtail her movie career for the "full-time job" of being his wife. 
Later in 1956, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) refused to renew Miller's passport, and called him to appear before the committee. His 1953 play, the Tony Award-winning The Crucible, a dramatization of the Salem witch trials of 1692 and an allegory about McCarthyism, was believed to be one of the reasons why Miller came under the committee's scrutiny. Miller refused to comply with the committee's demands to "out" people who had been active in certain political activities and was thus cited in contempt of Congress. 
In 1957, Brooks Atkinson wrote about Miller’s stand against HUAC: "He refused to be an informer. He refused to turn his private conscience over to administration by the state. He has accordingly been found in contempt of Congress. That is the measure of the man who has written these high-minded plays."
Miller and Monroe were married for five years, during which time the tragic sex symbol struggled with personal troubles and drug addiction. Miller barely wrote during their marriage, except for penning the screenplay of The Misfits as a gift for Monroe. The 1961 film, directed by John Huston, starred Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift. Around the same time as The Misfits release, Monroe and Miller divorced. 
Monroe died the following year, and Miller's controversial 1964 drama After the Fall was believed to have been partially inspired by their relationship. Miller was criticized for capitalizing on his marriage to Monroe so soon after her death, although the playwright denied this. Miller responded to his critics by saying: ''The play is a work of fiction. No one is reported in this play. The characters are created as they are in any other play in order to develop a coherent theme, which in this case concerns the nature of human insight, of self-destructiveness and violence toward others.'' 
In 1962, Miller married Austrian-born photographer Inge Morath. The couple had two children, Rebecca and Daniel. Miller insisted that their son, Daniel, who was born with Down syndrome, be excluded from the family's personal life. The infant was institutionalized, and Morath reportedly tried to bring him home as a toddler but to no avail. 
Years later, actor Daniel Day-Lewis who married Miller's daughter Rebecca, visited his wife's brother frequently. Day-Lewis eventually persuaded Miller to make further contact with his adult son, who had been able to establish a happy life with outside support. Daniel's existence was unknown to most of the public until after Miller's death. 
Miller's other plays include A View From the Bridge (1955), Incident at Vichy (1964), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), The American Clock (1980) and Broken Glass (1994). 
In his later career, Miller continued to explore societal and personal issues that probed the American psyche, though critical and commercial responses to the work didn't garner the acclaim of his earlier productions. 
He also wrote the 1980 TV movie Playing for Time and an adaptation for the theater. The project was based on the autobiography of Fania Fénelon, who was a member of an all-women's orchestra that was imprisoned at the Auschwitz death camps during the Holocaust. The film courted controversy from Jewish organizations and Fénelon herself for its casting of Vanessa Redgrave, who had criticized Zionism and supported Palestinian organizations.
In addition to his plays, Miller collaborated with Morath on books including In the Country (1977) and 'Salesman' in Beijing (1984). In 1987, Miller published his autobiography Timebends: A Life. In his autobiography, he wrote that when he was young he “imagined that with the possible exception of a doctor saving a life, writing a worthy play was the most important thing a human being could do.” 
Miller's plays have become American classics that continue to speak to new generations of audiences. Death of a Salesman has had numerous screen adaptations, including a 1985 TV version that starred Dustin Hoffman, who also starred in the previous year's Broadway revival. In 1996, a film adaptation of The Crucible hit theaters, starring Winona Ryder, Joan Allen and Day-Lewis. Miller penned the screenplay, which earned him the sole Academy Award nomination of his career.
In 2002, Miller's third wife, Morath, died. He soon was engaged to 34-year-old minimalist painter Agnes Barley but fell into ill health before they could walk down the aisle. On February 10, 2005, the 56th anniversary of Death of a Salesman's Broadway debut, Miller died of heart failure at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, surrounded by Barley, family and friends. He was 89 years old.
In March 2018, HBO aired the documentary Arthur Miller: Writer. Directed and narrated by his daughter Rebecca, the piece chronicled the life of the great American playwright, from the creation of his iconic plays, to his marriage to Monroe to his relationships with family members.