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 TODAY IN LITERARY HISTORY: October 17
Birthday of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Arthur Miller.

After World War II, American theater began to change dramatically—and much of that shift came from playwright Arthur Miller. Having lived through the Depression and the war, Miller gave voice to the unease many Americans felt in the late 1940s and ’50s. His plays—All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge—offered a tough look at morality, ambition, and what it meant to succeed in postwar America.

Miller became as famous offstage as on. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, faced the House Un-American Activities Committee, and married movie icon Marilyn Monroe. They first met in 1951, married in 1956 after Miller left his first wife, and collaborated on The Misfits (1961), which he wrote for her. Sadly, the marriage fell apart during filming; Monroe died the following year.

The Misfits was unlucky for others, too—Clark Gable suffered a fatal heart attack just after shooting ended. Miller’s Hollywood ties lived on through his family: his daughter Rebecca married actor Daniel Day-Lewis.
 

Did You Know?

• When Death of a Salesman opened in 1949, it sold out for months and made Willy Loman a symbol of the American dream’s dark side.


• Miller was once denied a U.S. passport because he refused to name names before Congress.

• Years later, Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar for playing Lincoln—one of Miller’s lifelong moral heroes.

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