Arthur Asher Miller was born on October 17th, 1915 in Manhattan. He was the second son of Isidore and Augusta Miller, both Jewish immigrants from Poland.
Isidore did his best to achieve the American Dream for his family. His clothing company, S. Miller & Sons, was prosperous enough that the family could afford a comfortable apartment overlooking Central Park and a chauffeured car that carried Isidore to work each morning.
Sadly, these shining, chauffeured times wouldn't last. In October 1929, just a few weeks after Arthur's fourteenth birthday, the stock market crashed. Having invested nearly all his money in the market, the Miller family found themselves wiped out. They packed up and moved to a simple home in Brooklyn, a more affordable borough.
Yup. Brooklyn and "more affordable" in the same sentence. Oh, the good ol' days.
He graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1932, and began working in an auto-parts warehouse, socking away $13 of the $15 he was paid every week for his future college tuition. He also took night classes at New York City College, though he dropped out when the demands of work and school together proved too much. Undeterred, Miller applied to the University of Michigan.
He was rejected.
Twice.
Slightly deterred, Miller applied to Ann Arbor, where he finally enrolled in 1934.
In college, he realized his calling as a writer. In his autobiography Timebends, Miller wrote, "with the possible exception of a doctor saving a life, writing a worthy play was the most important thing a human being could do."5
Really, Arty? One time, a guy auto-tuned his fart and made a whole song out of it. You still think writing a play is more impressive?
Over the spring break of his sophomore year, Miller wrote No Villain, his first play. The play received the university's prestigious Hopwood Award, which included much-needed scholarship money. A revised version of the play earned him another $1,250 in prize money from the Theater Guild's Bureau of New Plays. Miller entered the Hopwood contest again the following year, walking away with first and second place honors.
He graduated from college in 1938 and found a job writing radio plays for the Federal Theater Project, a New Deal program that supported the dramatic arts. In a shadow of the anti-Communist fervor that would engulf the country a decade later, Congress cut the program's budget in 1939 over suspicions about the writers' leftist sympathies. Although Miller was unabashedly leftist, he never joined the Communist party.
He also never wrote an autotuned fart song. Just throwing that out there.
An unemployed Miller went on welfare, but he never stopped writing. A year later, he married his college sweetheart, Mary Slattery, and the couple moved to Brooklyn. It was a trying time professionally for Miller. He had written two plays, The Half Bridge and The Golden Years, but was unable to find a producer interested in them. Mary supported them by working as an editor and waitress. Miller eventually took on a job at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, working nights to leave his days free for writing.
Two hard years of professional disillusionment nearly ended Miller's career. In 1943 he was hired as a screenwriter for the film The Story of G.I. Joe, but his Hollywood experience was so disappointing that he quit before the film was done. The next year, Mary gave birth to daughter Jane, and Miller's play The Man Who Had All the Luck received the Theater Guild National Award.
Was Arthur's luck changing?
Eh. Not really. The play's Broadway opening tanked, and it closed after only four performances.
We've seen musical fart videos with more longevity than that.
Miller seriously considered quitting, and his experience left him with a lifelong distaste for critics. "I never had a critic in my corner in this country," he later told an interviewer, adding that he never saved reviews of his plays. "I don't know a critic who penetrates the center of anything."6
We're with you, Arthur. We never read our critic's reviews.
And by "critics," we mean YouTube trolls. And by "never," we mean frequently, and yes, we usually end up crying.
Whatever.