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Arthur Miller, who died on February 09 at his home in Connecticut, aged 89, was among the greatest playwrights of the 20th century. In his seven-decade career which he described as a "bad habit" -- Miller created indelible works of family, social and moral conflict, including Death of a Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953).
Miller witnessed every defining period in recent American history -- the Wall Street crash, the second world war, the cold war, McCarthyism, the assassination of President Kennedy, Watergate, Vietnam and the September 11 attacks. Indeed, Miller's most famous dramas wrestle with history and personal conscience, and probe the question of what it is to be an American -- as well as themes of denial, betrayal and responsibility.
"I am simply asking for a theatre in which an adult who wants to live can find plays that will heighten his awareness of what living in our time involves," Miller once said.
His experiments with form were not always successful, and some critics found his work didactic. But his greatest plays possess enormous dramatic charge, with moral conflict building towards cathartic climaxes.
"His plays and his conscience are a cold burning force," the playwright Edward Albee said.
Miller was born in Manhattan on October 17 1915, the son of Isidore Miller, an almost illiterate Polish immigrant, who built a successful clothing business. Arthur and his brother and sister were raised in a wealthy Jewish household until the family was forced downmarket by the 1929 market crash. Miller was aware of the psychological impact of the Depression. The experience sharpened his sensitivity to the social injustice and fragility that colours much of his work.
Lacking money for university, Miller worked two jobs to save the fees for the University of Michigan. He started writing plays while studying journalism there.
By the late 1940s, he had had one success with All My Sons (1947). But his Pulitzer Prize-winning Death of a Salesman made his name. The tragedy of an ordinary man, it attacked the empty materialism at the core of the American Dream. Grown men wept at its premiere.
Miller directed a groundbreaking revival of Salesman - often regarded as a quintessentially American critique of capitalism - in Beijing in 1983, where it was appreciated as an intergenerational tragedy. "It was our story that we did not know until we heard it," said the playwright David Mamet.
All Miller's work -- including screenplays for film and television, fiction and lectures -- explores the links between the social, the political and the psychological, between the wider world and the individual. The Crucible (1953) was perhaps the most significant example, tackling the anti-Communist hysteria of the McCarthy era. Miller would experience the Red Scare first hand: in 1957 he was convicted of contempt of Congress before the House un-American activities committee -- a conviction reversed the following year.
His attention to injustice would frequently extend into his personal life. From 1965-69, he was international president of PEN, the worldwide society of writers; he was twice a delegate to the Democratic party's national conventions, and supported liberal causes throughout his life.
But Miller voiced his criticisms obliquely. The Crucible dramatises the 17th century Salem witch trials in a highly charged drama that charts the ease with which societies slip into fear and paranoia.
The theme of the informer resurfaced in A View From the Bridge (1956), in which a Brooklyn longshoreman reports illegal immigrants to assuage his own guilt.
In spite of a reputation for realism, Miller often meshed past and present as characters examine their lives. In particular, After the Fall (1964) places most of the significant figures in the protagonist's life on stage simultaneously. But it drew more interest for its seemingly autobiographical portrayal of Miller's relationship with film legend Marilyn Monroe, his wife from 1956 to 1961.
He was a man of great charisma, with stature and dignity leavened with graciousness and a salty sense of humour. An avid carpenter, Miller built the shed in which he wrote Death of a Salesman, and, later, for his Connecticut home, his own bed and dining-room table.
Miller worked well into his last years. After winning a Lifetime Achievement Tony award (1999) and one from the National Book Foundation (2001), Miller would complete two more plays; his most recent, Finishing The Picture -- loosely about Marilyn Monroe -- premiered at Chicago's Goodman Theatre just four months ago.
He married three times, first to Mary Slattery in 1940, with whom he had a son, Robert, and a daughter, Jane. His marriage to Monroe produced no children, but yielded a screenplay, The Misfits, filmed in 1961. In 1962 he married the photographer Inge Morath, who died in 2002. They had a daughter, Repecca.
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