Arthur Miller Plan

Conclusion

He got a precocious start

Arthur Miller wrote his first play, No Villain, over spring break as a sophomore at the University of Michigan. (Accounts vary: in a Paris Review interview, Miller claimed he wrote it in six days. His biographer Neil Carson put it at six weeks.) Written to win a contest, the play tells a story of a family much like his own, of a young son and his business-owning father during a garment strike. Miller won the $250 grand prize, and had all the encouragement he needed to continue writing.

He knew heat waves

In the days before air conditioning, urban heatwaves were uncomfortable, and occasionally deadly. In a piece published in The New Yorker aptly titled Before Air Conditioning, Miller reflected on the experience of surviving heatwaves in his youth in the 1920s.
...[O]n 111th and farther uptown mattresses were put out as night fell, and whole families lay on those iron balconies in their underwear ... With a couple of other kids, I would go across 110th to the park and walk among the hundreds of people, singles and families, who slept on the grass, next to their big alarm clocks, which set up a mild cacophony of the second passing, one clock's ticks syncopating with another's. Babies cried in the darkness, men's deep voices murmured, and a woman let out an occasional high laugh beside the lake.

He was a carpenter

In an almost preening appearance in the Paris Review, interviewers met the playwright on his Roxbury, Connecticut, estate in 1966. They first encountered Miller as he hammered away on his latest project: converting a barn into a guest house. Other eccentricities of his country living space included a microphone dangling from the arm of a lamp, as well as a rifle at the ready for any fowl or rodents who happened to pass by the window.
With his family’s wealth wiped out by the crashed stock market, Miller was thrust into the workforce in high school. To save up for college, he took up gigs as a radio singer, a truck driver, and a clerk in an automobile-parts warehouse. Even in his University of Michigan days, he subsisted on the $15 a month he earned from washing dishes and tending to lab mice.