Arthur Miller Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Arthur Miller - Research Paper Example Miller's first play to make it to Broadway, The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), was a dismal failure, closing after only four performances. This early setback almost discouraged Miller from writing completely, but he gave himself one more try. Three years later,  All My Sons  won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award as the best play of 1947, launching Miller into theatrical stardom. All My Sons, a drama about a manufacturer of faulty war materials, was strongly influenced by the naturalist drama of Henrik Ibsen. Along with  Death of a Salesman  (his most enduring success), All My Sons and The Man Who Had All the Luck form a thematic trilogy of plays about love triangles involving fathers and sons. The drama of the family is at the core of all of Miller's major plays, but nowhere is it more prominent than in the realism of All My Sons and the impressionism of Death of a Salesman, a play which secured Miller’s reputation as one of the nation’s foremost playwr ights. Also in 1956, Miller married actress Marilyn Monroe. The two divorced in 1961, one year before her death. That year Monroe appeared in her last film, The Misfits, which is based on an original screenplay by Miller. After divorcing Monroe, Miller wed Ingeborg Morath, to whom he remained married until his death in 2005. The pair had a son and a daughter. Miller also wrote the plays A Memory of Two Mondays and the short A View from the Bridge, which were both staged in 1955. His other works include After the Fall (1964), a thinly veiled account of his marriage to Monroe, as well as The Price (1967), The Archbishop's Ceiling (1977), and  The American  Clock (1980). His most recent works include the plays The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), and Broken Glass (1993), which won the Olivier Award for Best Play. Miller also wrote the plays A Memory of Two Mondays and the short A View from the Bridge, which were both staged in 1955. His other works include After the Fall (1964), a thinly veiled account of his marriage to Monroe, as well as The Price (1967), The Archbishop's Ceiling (1977), and  The American  Clock (1980). His most recent works include the plays The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), and Broken Glass (1993), which won the Olivier Award for Best Play. Although Miller did not write frequently for film, he did pen an adaptation for the 1996 film version of The Crucible starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder, which garnered him an Academy Award nomination. Miller's daughter Rebecca married Day-Lewis in 1996. With  Tennessee Williams, Miller was one of the best-known American playwrights after WW II. Several of his works were filmed by such director as John Huston, Sidney Lumet and Karel Reiz. Arthur Miller was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1949 for  Death of a Salesman.  He has come to be considered one of the greatest dramatists in the history of the American Theatre, and his plays, a fusion of naturalistic and expressionistic techniques, continue to be widely produced. Arthur Miller's  Death of a Salesman  stems from both Arthur Miller's personal experiences and the theatrical traditions in which the playwright was schooled. Miller is in some way accusing a culture that encourages "wrong" values and campaigning against an uncharitable social order that deprives honest workers of constructive labor, then discards those who are no longer useful. The play recalls the