Arthur Miller

American playwright (1915 - 2005)

• || At The Bottom

• 1944 -- 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.

• || At The Top

• 1949 -- It was opening night for Arthur Miller's new play, Death of a Salesman, and as the final curtain dropped, Alan Hewitt -- one of the cast members -- wondered how the audience would respond.  "There was a long, deathly silence," he remembered.  "I held my breath for what seemed like an eternity and then the whole audience exploded.  They cheered, hollered, clapped, hooted and screamed and would not stop.  Even after the actors stopped taking curtain calls, they milled around and wouldn't leave." The audience that night had witnessed the opening of one of the greatest plays in the history of American drama.  In 1949 alone, Miller's play would go on to earn the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a Tony Award for Best Author, and the New York Drama Circle Critics' Award.  Whereas his first play had folded after a handful of performances, Death of a Salesman would run for several years, with 742 performances in all before the run concluded.  It has since been performed likely hundreds of thousands of times in theaters across the world -- including China, where Miller took the play in 1983.  Miller would go on to write several dozen celebrated works of drama, the best known of these being The Crucible and The Price.  (He would also spend five years in a different sort of drama, as the husband of  Marilyn Monroe.)  In an interesting twist of fortune, Miller's first play -- the one that flopped so badly -- would later receive greater critical appreciation and would be staged more successfully in London as well as on Broadway.  After his death in 2005, Miller was hailed as one of the century's great playwrights, a man whose works -- as one critic observed -- "will always stand with the masterpieces of Ibsen, Shakespeare and Sophocles."

• || The Comeback

• Miller's first play was a terrible disappointment, and Miller himself was never completely happy with the project, even as it was being readied for its debut on Broadway.  But as he was writing it, he stumbled upon a theme -- the relationship between fathers, sons, and brothers -- that would mark his work for the rest of his career.  "The Man Who Had All the Luck," he explained years later, "through its endless versions, was to move me inch by inch toward my first open awareness of father-son and brother-brother conflict."  Once he realized that he was interested in these family tensions, he felt "an indescribable new certainty that I could speak from deep within myself, had seen something than no one else had seen." While the  failure of the play proved to be a great disappointment, Miller was able to look beyond the immediate moment and  see that he had happened upon an important source of inspiration that would come to serve him well in the coming years.