Miller wrote Salesman’s first act in under a day
Arthur Miller (1915–2005) shaped mid-century American drama with All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge. In a Roxbury studio in 1948 he wrote Salesman’s first act in under a day and completed the whole play within six weeks.
Miller was born in Harlem in 1915 to a Polish-Jewish family whose clothing firm employed 400 people, until the 1929 crash wiped them out and sent them to Brooklyn. He delivered bread before school, worked menial jobs to afford the University of Michigan, and there won the Hopwood Award for his first play, No Villain. A high-school football injury to his left kneecap kept him out of the Second World War. His Broadway debut, The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), closed after four performances; All My Sons (1947) finally made his name and won a Tony.
In 1948 he built a small studio in Roxbury, Connecticut, wrote the first act of Death of a Salesman there in less than a day, and finished within six weeks. Directed by Elia Kazan with Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman, it opened at the Morosco Theatre on 10 February 1949, ran 742 performances, and became the first play to win the Tony, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and the Pulitzer.
Politics then intervened. In 1952 Kazan named Miller among former Communist Party members to the House Un-American Activities Committee, ending their friendship for a decade. Miller went to Salem to research the 1692 witch trials, and The Crucible, which opened on 22 January 1953, became his most produced play. A View from the Bridge answered Kazan’s pro-informer film On the Waterfront. Subpoenaed in 1956, with Marilyn Monroe at his side, Miller refused to name names; convicted of contempt in 1957, he won on appeal in 1958.
He later wrote the screenplay for The Misfits (1961) and backed Peter Reilly, a young man he believed had been railroaded into a murder conviction. Honours included the Praemium Imperiale in 2001 and the Jerusalem Prize in 2003. He died on 10 February 2005, fifty-six years to the day after Salesman opened.
Source: Arthur Miller
