http://www.cnn.com/2005/S...index.html

ROXBURY, Connecticut (AP) -- Arthur Miller, the Pulitzer prize-winning playwright whose most famous fictional creation, Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman," came to symbolize the American Dream gone awry, has died, his assistant said Friday. He was 89.

Miller died Thursday evening, said his assistant, Julia Bolus.

She did not give a cause of death.

His plays, with their strong emphasis on family, morality and personal responsibility, spoke to the growing fragmentation of American society.

"A lot of my work goes to the center of where we belong -- if there is any root to life -- because nowadays the family is broken up, and people don't live in the same place for very long," Miller said in a 1988 interview.

"Dislocation, maybe, is part of our uneasiness. It implants the feeling that nothing is really permanent."

Miller's career was marked by early success. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for "Death of a Salesman" in 1949, when he was just 33 years old.

His marriage to screen star Marilyn Monroe in 1956 further catapulted the playwright to fame, though that was publicity he said he never pursued.

In a 1992 interview with a French newspaper, he called her "highly self-destructive" and said that during their marriage, "all my energy and attention were devoted to trying to help her solve her problems. Unfortunately, I didn't have much success."

i'm not trying to be funny but i didn't know he was still alive. did he also do a play about the salem witch trials subject? i remember studying this play in high school but can't remember the title. he was really good.

heybaby said:

yeah, the crucible - it was a play using the salem witch trials as a metaphor for mccarthyism.

Anxiety said:

yeah thats it. it was the first time i was introduced to modern plays (before that all we read was shakespeare). i thought it would be boring but my teacher had us act it out. considering how shy i am, i really enjoyed it and it really left me thinking about how sheep-minded some Americans were back then.

A very talented man.

The Crucible is more relevant than ever these days. Hope Arthur had his questions ready for the big man.

I just started reading his stuff last summer.
A very talented man indeed!!

r.i.p. mister miller

IstenSzek said:

His daughter Rebecca is married to Daniel Day Lewis. My favourite actor

"In 1995, Miller met Daniel Day-Lewis at her father's house. He was starring in a film version of Miller's play The Crucible, and was quite an admirer of the playwright already. 'There's something about Arthur,' he said at the time, 'that makes you wish he was your father. I'd like to turn up on his doorstep with adoption papers.' They managed to conduct their affair privately, and, at the end of 1996, Rebecca married Daniel Day-Lewis in a small ceremony in Vermont. It sounds a magical occasion: the ground was covered in snow and she wore a midnight-blue dress; her father wrote a poem and they were married by the chaplain at Yale, a man who had been friends with Arthur Miller since their days protesting against the Vietnam War, and who had baptised Rebecca when she decided to convert to Catholicism at the age of 13."

That's sad news. But he has written some amazing stuff. And he has reached a nice age. Rest in peace, Arthur...

rip Arthur Miller

I just started reading Death of a Salesman, and read The Crucible and All My Sons last year, great stuff.

Yeah, he was a talented writer

TheJourney4all7 said:

RIP

Anxiety said:

For many, "Death Of A Salesman" was his finest and most triumphant moment as a playwright. A fabulously intense play, way ahead of it's time, almost like a prophetic warning. However, my favourite was "The Crucible", not just for it's contents and metaphoric symbolism like you mentioned Anx., but also because Miller showed the maverick make up of the steel in his balls by trying and get a play like that published during that era of McCarthyism (reminisant of my other favourite literary hero, Eric "George Orwell" Blair, when he tirelessly kept pushing, without compromising his material, to get "Animal Farm" published during WWII. No one would dare do it due to Stalin's links with Churchhill).

Miller was a man of tremendous honour and courage. He refused to name names of friends and colleagues despite being "blacklisted" and outcast himself, when publically grilled by Joe and his "Communist witch hunting" committee. I remember my English teacher telling me all about him after class one time. What a brave man of immense loyalty and integrity.

Saw a brilliant BBC documentary on him too about month or so ago. He rarely gives interviews and I think it may have been his last one, made sometime in 2004. It was a fascinating insight into the great playwright's life and works. Very frank and introspective.


Thank you Mr. Miller Sir, for giving and leaving your thought provoking concepts in the form of plays. It was one of the things that "woke" me up whilst growing up!


R.I.P

senik said:

i did not know he did that. how commendable.

senik said:

On the BBC-site, I've seen an excellent fragment of a long interview in 1987 with Arthur Miller.

Lleena said:

And she is very talented in her own right. She wrote and directed one of my favorite films in the past few years, Personal Velocity. Her new movie, The Ballad of Jack and Rose got good reviews at Sundance this year.

Arthur Miller is one of my favorite playwrights. Eugene O'Neill is my all-time favorite, but my gosh what an incredible body of work Miller has left behind - All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, The Misfits, Focus...the list goes on. A big loss in the world of theatre and film.