Arthur Miller.

The Depression destroyed his father Isidore Miller’s women’s coat business, seeding young Arthur Miller’s disillusionment with the American Dream. He was born on October 17, 1915 in Harlem, New York City, one of three children of Austrian Jewish descent. To earn tuition for the University of Michigan, he worked a variety of jobs. There he wrote his first plays, winning the Avery Hopwood Award in Drama in 1937 for No Villain. Graduating in 1938 with a journalism degree, he joined the Federal Theatre Project.

Miller’s Broadway breakthrough came in 1947 with All My Sons, directed by Elia Kazan, which earned him a Tony Award for Best Author and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. His masterpiece, Death of a Salesman, opened at the Morosco Theatre on February 10, 1949, running for 742 performances. It won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, six Tony Awards, and made Willy Loman an icon of the stage. In 1953, he wrote The Crucible, a parable of the McCarthy witch hunts, winning the Tony for Best Play. His 1955 work A View from the Bridge explored incestuous desire in a Greek tragedy framework. He wrote the screenplay for The Misfits 1961 after marrying Marilyn Monroe and later fictionalized their relationship in After the Fall 1964. He continued to write into the 1990s, with plays like Broken Glass winning a Laurence Olivier Award.

Miller married his college girlfriend Mary Slattery in 1940; they had two children, Jane Ellen and Robert A., before divorcing in 1956. That same year he married Marilyn Monroe in a Jewish ceremony in White Plains, New York. The marriage was tumultuous, partly due to Monroe’s self-destructive tendencies, and they divorced in 1961. In 1962 he married photographer Inge Morath, with whom he had a daughter, Rebecca Miller later wife of actor Daniel Day-Lewis, and a son, Daniel, who was born with Down Syndrome and placed in an institution. Morath died in 2002. In his final years, he lived with artist Agnes Barley at his Roxbury, Connecticut farm.

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman has been revived on Broadway every decade since its debut, with actors including Dustin Hoffman 1984 and Brian Dennehy 1999 earning acclaim. He staged the play in Beijing in 1983, demonstrating its universal themes, and received the National Medal of Arts in 1993 as well as a Special Lifetime Achievement Tony Award in 1999. His willingness to fight for artistic freedom, even facing contempt of Congress in 1957, made him a moral voice in American letters. He died on February 10, 2005, exactly 56 years after Death of a Salesman opened, and his plays continue to be produced internationally.