Arthur Miller was born in New York City (1915). His father was the wealthy owner of a coat factory, and the family had a large Manhattan apartment, a chauffeur, and a summer home at the beach. Then, in 1928, his father's business collapsed. He watched his parents sell their most valuable possessions, one by one, to pay the bills, until finally the family had to move in with relatives in Brooklyn. Miller had to share a bedroom with his grandfather. He was thirteen years old. It was terrifying for him to watch his father go from being so powerful to being so helpless. He said, "It made you want to search for ultimate values, for things that would not fall apart under pressure." He paid his way through college with a job in a research laboratory, feeding hundreds of mice every night. He had never been interested in theater before, but he thought he would enter a play writing contest to make some extra money, and he won with the first play he'd ever written. He won the same contest the following year, and decided that he was born to write plays. Unfortunately, the first play he wrote out of college, The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), closed after four performances.
He considered giving up but decided to try writing one more play. His next play, All My Sons (1947), was about a man who has been selling faulty machinery to the army, and finds out that he has caused the death of twenty-one soldiers. The play ran on Broadway for 328 performances, and was made into a movie the following year. Miller used the money he made from All My Sons to buy four hundred acres of farmland in Connecticut. In 1948, he moved to Connecticut by himself, and spent several months building a ten by twelve foot cabin by hand. As he sawed the wood and pounded the nails, he thought about the main characters of his next play: a salesman, his wife, and his two sons. He knew how the play would begin, but he wouldn't let himself start writing until he had finished the cabin. When it was finally completed, he woke up one morning and started writing. He wrote all day, had dinner, and then wrote until he had finished the first act in the middle of the night. When he finally got in bed to go to sleep, he found that his cheeks were wet with tears, and his throat was sore from speaking and shouting the lines of dialogue as he wrote. The play was Death of a Salesman (1949), about a man named Willy Loman who loses his job and realizes that he doesn't have much to show for his life's work. Miller wrote, "For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine." It has gone on to be the most widely produced play in the world, playing in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Argentina. It has been particularly popular in China and Japan. Miller has gone on to have an extremely long and productive career, publishing short fiction, essays, an autobiography, and many more plays. His most recent play, Resurrection Blues, premiered in 2002 at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Source: The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor
*A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
*A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.
*A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay.
*A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that's what it's for!
*All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.
*Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.
*Can anyone remember love? It's like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume.
*Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.
*Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.
*Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.
*He wants to live on through something-and in his case, his masterpiece is his son. all of us want that, and it gets more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world.
*He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.
*I cannot sleep for dreaming; I cannot dream but I wake and walk about the house as though I'd find you coming through some door.
*I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult.
*I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act.
*I think it's a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one's self.
*I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play-but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.
*I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.
*In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera.
Arthur Miller
*Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not.
*Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.
*Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
*Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way.
*That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?
*The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.
*The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.
*The job is to ask questions-it always was-and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.
*The number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a computer down. the right season for that play, the right historical moment, the right tonality.
*The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.
*The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.
*The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.
*Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.
*What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all.
*Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?
*Without alienation, there can be no politics.
*You cannot catch a child's spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon itself return.
*You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.
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