Rough Crossing

About Death of a Salesman

Arthur Millerwriting what he knew

No one could have guessed that Arthur Miller would become one of America’s great playwrights when he was born in 1915. The son of a successful tailor and factory owner, young Arthur lived a comfortable life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His family was a close-knit one, with mother and father, and other relatives, working in the garment business. But like so many other Americans at the time, the Millers would face hardships in the Great Depression. After losing their business, they moved to a small house outside Manhattan, and Arthur Miller began to think of himself as a Brooklynite—an identity that would influence his writing throughout his career.

Miller’s tenacity and penchant for competition developed in his Brooklyn years. His love of sports in high school would lead to a football injury that precluded his service in the military during World War II. After graduating, he applied to colleges that would nurture his passion and talent for writing, but the University of Michigan—his first choice—twice rejected him. Only after Miller wrote a personal appeal imploring the dean to reconsider was he admitted, enrolling in 1936. At Michigan, he justified the dean’s confidence by earning two undergraduate awards, in addition to numerous citations for his playwriting. In 1940 Arthur Miller returned to Brooklyn with a bachelor’s degree, a new wife, and not much else.

As a member of the working class, he took assorted jobs to provide for his young, growing family; he was a writer for the Federal Theatre Project and a ship fitter’s assistant at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. But he had always felt that his personal writing projects were his most important work. Finally, after some success with radio plays, he made his Broadway debut with The Man Who Had All the Luck in 1944. Although the play closed after just four performances, Miller, used to bouncing back after adversity, was undaunted. His second stab at Broadway, All My Sons (1947), was a major success: Miller was able to quit his jobs and focus on his writing full-time in his Roxbury, Connecticut, home, paid for by the fruits of his theatrical labor.

In 1949, Miller followed All My Sons with Death of a Salesman, the play that won him the Pulitzer Prize and launched him into the ‘status’-sphere of national celebrity. Still, no matter how much fame, glamour, and gossip surrounded the playwright, he continued to write with an awareness of the times in which he lived, with keen observations on American society. His best work is characterized by his ability to fuse public, social issues with echoes of his own private life. His refusal to name names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities was refigured in The Crucible (1953); the turbulence of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe ignited After the Fall (1964). And, even in Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller was writing what he knew—the pathos, the humor, the poetry, and the humanity of the play resonate profoundly with his own history and his beloved Brooklyn.

—Donesh Olyaie, Production Dramaturg