Arthur Miller

  b. 1915; d. 2005 | American playwright

At The Bottom

— 1944

**Both Aquino and his wife Corazon knew he was a marked man and that it was entirely possible he would not survive the trip.**

As his first play flopped after less than a full week of performances, Arthur Miller must have wondered why he titled it The Man Who Had All the Luck.  Only six years earlier, Miller had graduated from the University of Michigan with high hopes for his future as a novelist and playwright.  While at Michigan, he had won two Hopwood awards — a prestigious prize awarded to aspiring writers at the university — and was a runner up once as well.  After graduation, he moved to New York City and took a job with the Federal Theater Project, where he expected to make a quick mark on American drama.  Unfortunately, the Federal Theater Project closed shop a year after Miller arrived, and he found himself having a difficult time getting his work published or staged.  He managed to find work writing for radio dramas and was hired to work on a screenplay about the war journalist Ernie Pyle, but Miller was not at all satisfied.  He seemed to have gotten his big break, however, when The Man Who Had All the Luck was accepted as a Broadway production — something that was unheard of for a first play by such a young talent.  Miller’s triumph, however, turned to bitter disappointment when the play opened in November 1944.  Critics scorned it.  Five of the seven daily newspapers in New York trashed the play, with one describing it as “incredibly turgid in its writing and stuttering in its execution.” With poor attendance and a cold critical reception, the producers had little choice but to shut Miller’s play down after four performances.