A birthday to which "attention must be paid."

Arthur Asher Miller (1915-2005)

Playwright, activist

He wrote 37 plays in 68 years (the first act of Death of a Salesman in a day, the entire play in six weeks); 13 radio plays; eight screenplays- including The Misfits, which starred his second wife, Marilyn Monroe- six books of short fiction, and six of nonfiction. He won the Pulitzer Prize; the PEN International Theater Award; the National Book Foundation Medal; the Principe de Asturias Prize; the National Medal of Arts; seven Tony awards; an Obie; an Olivier; the Gish Prize; the Prix Moliere; and two Drama Critics Circle Awards. He championed dissidents and writers- often in the same person- the world over, and for his pains saw his plays banned in the Soviet Union for two decades. But he lived long enough to direct a production of Death of a Salesman in China. Run through the witch-hunt mill of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he responded by writing The Crucible.

He was inspired by the works of Sophocles, in which mortals try to make their way against implacable Fate: in his plays, they wrestle the American Dream. Few portrayed the inner working of families as he could. “The structure of a play,” he said, “is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.”

Arthur Miller’s world view was often scathingly expressed: a 1995 New York Times op-ed, after the election of Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America”  Congress, mocked their claims they would so downsize government a congressional office building could be sold, and their strangling of health care reform. He called for privatizing the government, and having elected representatives run not on party but corporate interest labels, based on which ones were giving the the most support (another two decades of campaign finance law guttings have largely brought this to pass).

His 2001 Jefferson Lecture, “On Politics and the Art of Acting, outraged conservatives (George Will sniffed that “Arthur Miller is not a real scholar”) and called for the replacement of the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities by someone more like President George W. Bush.

"The country is now being ruled by actors," he reiterated in a 2004 interview. "Behind the play is a kind of death dance taking place. Politicians have always pretended to be what they aren't. I keep thinking of the Romans because they were conscious of the power of the ritualized performance. Every culture has it, but it struck me that we're doing it now on such a crude, open, ridiculous level."

By the end of his life, Miller grew pessimistic: “I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.” Of his character Willy Loman, Miller said fathers want to live on through something, and their masterpieces are their sons. But his was born with Down’s Syndrome, and Miller locked him away in an institution for decades, until finally his son-in-law, the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, persuaded him to establish a relationship with him.

Playwright David Mamet said Miller’s genius was finding dignity in failure. Even as Miller wondered about the future of Broadway, his last play opened in Chicago six months before he died, and he confessed to having all sorts of nascent ideas gestating.

“‘I still love the form. It's a great, great human adventure. Imagine having a human being stand up on a platform and mesmerize an audience and sometimes even illuminate something for them. You don't need machinery. It's a very primitive art. That's the beauty of it.”

“Is he working on a new play?

“‘I probably am, but I don't know it.’”

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