It’s the birthday of American playwright Arthur Miller (1915-2005), who lived twice as long as yesterday’s playwright. (Yes, I know it’s not a competition. Everybody calm down.) Miller is best known for the play Death of a Salesman (1949), but even during his successes as a playwright, he became more famous for his marriage to Marilyn Monroe.

Miller was born in Manhattan to a wealthy family who lived in an apartment on Central Park. His father was a coat manufacturer, but the business tanked during the Great Depression and the family had to move to the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Miller had to work as a delivery boy and then, after graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1932, in a warehouse. He already knew he wanted to be a writer, and while studying at the University of Michigan began winning awards for his plays.

After college, however, a handful of Miller’s plays got rejected, and when his play The Man Who Had All the Luck ran on Broadway, it closed down after four performances. He decided to give playwriting one more shot before packing it in (gosh, could that sentence sound more American?), and the result was a play called All My Sons. The play was about the people caught up in a military scandal involving defective equipment responsible for the deaths of 21 Army pilots, and it won two Tonys and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. (Eugene O’Neill, whose birthday was yesterday, came in second with Ice Man Cometh. My apologies to Mr. O’Neill for choosing Oscar Wilde for yesterday’s post, but I don’t know, Wilde died so young, there were those two years’ hard labor and the meningitis and all the guff over velvet pants… Next year, O’Neill.)

Death of a Salesman came out in 1949 and was also a hit, though some critics called it melodramatic. (Critics can be so critical.) Then came An Enemy of the People (1950, an adaptation of Ibsen) and The Crucible (1953), about the Salem witch trials but also about the McCarthyism then rampant; it became Miller’s most produced play. He later wrote, “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.” When Miller himself was called before Congress to name names, he point-blank refused and was cited for contempt. Theatre people everywhere said, “Well done, Miller,” and eventually the courts said, “Oh, FINE,” and revoked the citation.

Miller was married three times; his second marriage was to Monroe, and the only thing he wrote during their marriage was the film The Misfits, which Monroe starred in. It came out in 1961 just after their divorce, and less than two years later Monroe died of a drug overdose. (Interesting fact: one of Miller’s three children, Rebecca Miller, is married to actor Daniel Day-Lewis.)

Have a fine Wednesday, take good care of any children who happen to be home sick from school, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.