The son of a salesman, Miller came of age during the Great Depression. While attending the University of Michigan, he began writing plays, two of which won awards and gained some attention. Completing his studies, the budding author accepted a job with the Federal Theatre Project where he wrote radio scripts and plays. In 1944, his first professional play, "The Man Who Had All the Luck" was produced and the following year, a novel, "Focus", was published. But it took another three years before Miller gained real acclaim. "All My Sons" (1947), a powerful drama about a son who learns his father cheated on the manufacturing of war material, earned him the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as Best Play. Two years later, what is considered his masterwork, "Death of a Salesman", was produced. A character study of a failed traveling salesman who blindly believes in the redemptive power of material success, the play won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award and the character Wille Loman became on of the most well-known in the history of theater, making audiences weep in productions staged in every corner of the globe. "I couldn't have predicted that a work like `Death of a Salesman' would take on the proportions it has," Miller said in 1988. "Originally, it was a literal play about a literal salesman, but it has become a bit of a myth, not only here but in many other parts of the world."
Miller's career thereafter, however, was marred by controversy. His 1953 award-winning play "The Crucible" was widely perceived to be an attack on the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Miller was called before HUAC in 1954. When he refused to name names and cooperate, he was cited for contempt of Congress, a conviction overturned on appeal. Long after the controversy and its initial tepid reception, the play became required reading in schools across Ameica for decades, and ultimately emerged as Miller's most performed work. "Its meaning is somewhat different in different places and moments," Miller said. "I can almost tell what the political situation in a country is when the play is suddenly a hit there — it is either a warning of tyranny on the way or a reminder of tyranny just past."
The playwright continued to produce popular successes like "A View From the Bridge". He further made headlines with his 1956 marriage to sex goddess Marilyn Monroe. During his marriage to the screen siren, Miller, hoping to create a vehicle that would demonstrate his devotion to his wife and provide her with a serious dramatic showcase, wrote his first produced screenplay, "The Misfits" (1961). Directed by John Huston and starring Monroe, Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable, the end result was an unsatisfying Western, and worse, it sowed the seeds for the dissolution of his turbulent marriage. He and Monroe were divorced the same year, the actress was dead from a drug overdose within the subsequent year (Miller did not attend her funeral) and decades later the writer would reflect on the reasons for the breakup, saying that he found himself devoting nearly all of his time to helping the troubled actress cope with a wealth of emotional and personal problems, with very little success. "To have survived, she would have had to be either more cynical or even further from reality than she was," he wrote in his 1987 biography Timebends. "Instead, she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes."
Miller's next plays, a thinly-veiled portrait of his struggles with Monroe in "After the Fall" and "Incident at Vichy" (both 1964) met with mixed audience and critical acceptance and ushered in an era of harsher criticism and even hostility toward much of his work, but his reputation was further enhanced with "The Price" (1968), a three-character drama that co-starred his sister, actress Joan Copeland. His reworking of the Book of Genesis, "The Creation of the World and Other Business" (1972) was a failure and marked the last new Miller play on Broadway for over two decades--he would for the rest of his life take every opportunity to chide Broadway for failing to initiate more serious dramatic works. A reworked, musicalized version of the latter, "Up From Paradise", premiered in 1974, but it too met with a decidedly unfavorable reception. His subsequent plays have divided critics and audiences. Miller also directed a Chinese production of "Death of a Salesman" at the Beijing Peoples' Art Theatre in 1983 and for The Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, Sweden in 1992.
Miller made a return to screenwriting with the muddled "Everybody Wins" (1990). In 1994, he returned to Broadway with "Broken Glass", a drama that examined a troubled marriage and the wife's identification with Jewish oppression under the Nazis. While many of Miller's plays have been filmed, only "The Crucible" (1996) had a screenplay credited to the author. He has had better success on the small screen beginning with his 1971 adaptation of "The Price" (NBC). Perhaps his best remembered teleplay was for the controversial "Playing for Time" (CBS, 1980). Set in Auschwitz, the story focused on a group of women who formed an orchestra and played for their captives. The primary focus of controversy was in the casting of Vanessa Redgrave as the leading character. Few could fault Miller's writing and he earned an Emmy for his efforts. In 1985, Dustin Hoffman reprised his stage portrayal of Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman" (CBS), with a script by Miller. Two years later, the author also wrote the teleplay for the PBS production of "All My Sons". He has also adapted his plays "Clara" (A&E, 1991) and "Broken Glass" (PBS, 1996) as well as lending his distinctive voice (as General Sherman) to Ken Burns' "The Civil War" (PBS, 1990). In 1999, 50 years after it won the Tony Award as best play, "Death of a Salesman" won the Tony for best revival of the Broadway season. The show also won the top acting prize for Brian Dennehy, who played Loman. That same year Miller received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Tony ceremony.
Refusing to rest on his considerable laurels, he writer continued to deliver new material into his twilight years: "Resurrection Blues" had its world premiere at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in the summer of 2002 when Miller was 86. Set in an unnamed banana republic, the satire dealt with the possible televised execution of a revolutionary. In 2004, another new play, "Finishing the Picture," premiered at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, based on an episode of his marriage to Monroe. Audiences rediscovered Miller's first Broadway play, "The Man Who Had All the Luck." It was a four-performance flop in 1944 but had a successful New York revival, starring Chris O'Donnell, decades later. A prolific essayist, Miller wrote highly regarded cultural criticism, appraising politics, literature and the theater in magazines such as Harper's and The Nation, many of which were compiled in Echoes Down the Corridor, published in 2000.
In 1962, Miller married to photographer Inge Morath, with whom he has collaborated on several books, primarily on their international travels. Their daughter Rebecca became a respected actor and filmmaker and married to Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis, who starred in the 1996 film version of his father-in-law's "The Crucible." Miller had long been hailed as America's greatest living playwright , but still marveled at the enduring power and appeal of his most famous works, which with their strong emphasis on family, morality and personal responsibility, spoke to the increasing fragmentation of American society. And he never stopped trying to find new audiences and venues for his art: He was preparing to mount a revival of "Death of a Salesman" in London (where theatergoers were especially appreciative of Miller's works as commentary on the American condition) and his play "The Ride Down to Mt. Morgan" was about to be made into a feature film starring Michael Douglas when he died at age 89 in 2005.