[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller was born in 1915 to well-to-do Jewish immigrant parents on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The Depression struck the family hard, however, and the garment business of Arthur's father, Isadore, began to decline. The Millers soon relocated to a small house on a dead-end street in the Gravesend neighborhood of Brooklyn, where their once-prosperous life became a struggle just to get by. In the face of these hardships, Arthur's older brother, Kermit, quit his studies at New York University and went to work, first with Isadore in the family business and later as a salesman in a friend's carpet company. Arthur's response was quite different. Siding with his mother, who blamed her hapless husband for the family's reduced circumstances, Miller decided early on to escape from what he saw as a bottomless well of despair and failure. Though short of money and not much of a student, he managed to enroll at the University of Michigan.
There, under the tutelage of George Pierce Baker, who had also taught Eugene O'Neill, Miller turned to drama as a way to capture the reality, as he viewed it, of those hardscrabble years. A "brooding young man burning with all the injustices of the world", he drew inspiration from left-wing artistic movements like the Group Theater and the Federal Theater, and took part in the 1940's in writers' meetings sponsored by the Communist party. He aspired to create plays that would raise awareness, change consciousness, reform society. After several early failures, Miller finally hit it big on Broadway with All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949), both of them about men whose values have been badly disordered by a materialistic society and its false notions of success. From his experience as a witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the early 1950's unlike his friend, the director Elia Kazan....
