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· American · 1915–2005

Arthur Miller

American playwright of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, convicted of contempt of Congress in 1957 for refusing to give congressional investigators the names of former associates. In Paris his play about the Salem witch trials became a hit for the most famous acting couple in France, Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, and then a film scripted by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre that Miller disliked — the play reached France years before its author was allowed a passport to follow it.

Details

Lived
1915–2005
Born
17 October 1915
Birthplace
New York City
Died
10 February 2005 · aged 89
Place of death
Roxbury, Connecticut
Nationality
American
Married
Mary Grace Slattery · 1940–1956Marilyn Monroe · 1956–1961Inge Morath · 1962–2002
Roles
PlaywrightAuthor

About Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller wrote two plays that never left the world's stages. Death of a Salesman (1949) watches a sixty-three-year-old travelling salesman named Willy Loman come apart in the last twenty-four hours of his life, because the country he believed in has no further use for him. The Crucible (1953) retells the Salem witch trials of 1692 — a Massachusetts village that hanged nineteen of its neighbours on the evidence of screaming children — as a way of writing about the anti-Communist investigations then running in Washington, which Miller would face himself three years later.

France took The Crucible faster and further than anywhere outside America. It opened in Paris in December 1954 as Les Sorcières de Salem — 'The Witches of Salem' — at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, one of the big public playhouses on the place du Châtelet in the centre of the city. It was adapted by the novelist Marcel Aymé, staged by the director Raymond Rouleau, and played by the most famous couple in French show business, the actress Simone Signoret and the singer-actor Yves Montand — and it ran more than 360 times over two seasons. Three years later Rouleau filmed it with a screenplay by Jean-Paul Sartre, France's leading philosopher. Miller thought Sartre had thrown 'an arbitrary Marxist mesh' over his story. He had not been able to see any of it in person: in 1954 the State Department — the branch of the American government that issues passports — refused him one.

Brooklyn, the crash, and a salesman

Miller was born in New York City on 17 October 1915, the son of a Jewish garment manufacturer whose business collapsed in the Depression, forcing the family from Manhattan to Brooklyn. He graduated from high school in 1932 into an economy with nothing to offer him, worked in an auto-parts warehouse — where he was the only Jew employed, and was treated accordingly — and saved his wages until he could enter the University of Michigan in 1934. There he won the Hopwood Award, the university's student writing prize, twice, and left in 1938 with a degree in English and a settled intention to write plays.

His first play on Broadway — the commercial theatre district of New York, where an American playwright's reputation was made or lost — closed after four performances in 1944. All My Sons, in 1947, established him. Then, in a small studio he built himself in the Connecticut countryside in 1948, he wrote Death of a Salesman. It opened in 1949, directed by Elia Kazan, the most influential stage and film director in America at the time, with Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman, and took all three of the honours an American play can win: the Pulitzer Prize for drama, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, voted by the city's reviewers, and the Tony, the Broadway industry's own award. What made it new was its shape: the stage holds the Loman house and Willy's memories at the same time, so that the past walks into the kitchen while the present is still going on. It is the reason people call it the great American play, and the reason it has never stopped being produced anywhere in the world.

Salem, and the committee

In 1952 Miller went to Salem, Massachusetts, and read the 1692 court records. The play he built from them, The Crucible, opened on Broadway in 1953. A group of girls, caught dancing in the woods, save themselves by accusing their neighbours of witchcraft; the court accepts spectral evidence — testimony about what a witness claims to have seen in a vision — and the accusations spread until the only escape is to confess and name others. John Proctor, a farmer with something real to hide, refuses to sign a false confession and hangs. Nobody in 1953 needed the parallel spelled out: the House Un-American Activities Committee — HUAC for short, a standing committee of the United States Congress investigating Communist influence in American life — was requiring witnesses to name former associates, and those who were named routinely lost their work. In the film and theatre industries the practice had a name, the blacklist: an informal but effective agreement among employers not to hire anyone under suspicion.

The parallel closed on him. In March 1954 the State Department refused him a passport to attend the Belgian premiere of The Crucible in Brussels, saying his application fell under regulations denying passports to people believed to support the Communist movement. Miller's reply, given to reporters at his Connecticut house, was a single sentence: 'I am not supporting any communist movement.' On 21 June 1956 he appeared before the committee itself, admitted signing public appeals issued in the 1940s by Communist-front organisations — bodies with innocuous names that were in fact run or steered by the Communist Party — denied that he had ever been under Communist discipline, meaning that he had ever taken orders from the Party, and refused to name the people he had seen at meetings. During a recess he told reporters he would marry the film star Marilyn Monroe before she left for England on 13 July. He was convicted of contempt of Congress in 1957; the United States Court of Appeals overturned the conviction in 1958.

Paris takes the play

The French première came at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt on the place du Châtelet on 16 December 1954, under the title Les Sorcières de Salem. The adaptation was by Marcel Aymé, a popular novelist with a hard, plain ear for spoken French; the director was Raymond Rouleau; the sets and costumes were by Lila de Nobili, the Italian designer who had built the Paris stage five years earlier for Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire in the French version made by the poet and film-maker Jean Cocteau. John Proctor was played by Yves Montand, the music-hall singer turned actor, and his wife Elisabeth by Simone Signoret, who was Montand's wife offstage as well. The production ran more than 360 performances across two seasons and then toured.

Casting made the politics literal. Montand and Signoret were prominent figures of the French Communist left, and were themselves barred from entering the United States until 1959. Signoret chose to play the wronged wife rather than Abigail, the young servant girl who starts the accusations and who is the showier part, and French audiences read the hangings at Salem straight onto the American present — the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the New York couple convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, had taken place the year before. The theatre scholar Julie Vatain-Corfdir, who reconstructed the production from its archives, notes the backhanded compliment French critics paid the evening: they praised the writing warmly, and then handed much of the credit for it to Aymé the adapter rather than to Miller, who had written the play.

Sartre's screenplay, and Miller's objection

In 1957 Rouleau filmed the play, again with Montand and Signoret, and the screenplay and dialogue were written by Jean-Paul Sartre — the philosopher of existentialism, the school of thought that holds that people are defined by what they choose to do rather than by any fixed nature; editor of Les Temps modernes ('Modern Times'), the monthly review of politics and literature he had helped to found; and by then the most openly Marxist intellectual in France. The Cinémathèque française — the French national film archive and museum — credits him with both the scénario, meaning the screenplay that lays the story out scene by scene, and the dialogue, the words the actors speak. The film was a French co-production with DEFA, the state film studio of Communist East Germany; the cinematographer Claude Renoir photographed it, the German composer Hanns Eisler wrote the music, and it ran 146 minutes, a little under two and a half hours. The critic André Bazin, who had founded the film magazine Cahiers du cinéma, called it one of the most serious and most daring things postwar world cinema had produced.

Sartre had rewritten the meaning. He made the accused villagers poor and their accusers propertied, so that the hysteria became a class conflict; he added a puritan ban on children's play; and he cut the slow, reasoned change of heart by which the Reverend Hale — the visiting minister the court brings in as its expert on witchcraft — turns against the trials, so that in the film the clergy are damned to a man. Miller's verdict, written thirty years later in Timebends (1987), the memoir he published at seventy-two, was that Sartre's screenplay 'seemed to me to toss an arbitrary Marxist mesh over the story that led to a few absurdities.' It is the sharpest sentence in the record of his French reception, and it is the reason his Paris story is worth telling: the play that got him prosecuted in Washington for insufficient anti-Communism was, in Paris, rewritten to be more Communist than he had ever meant it.

Brook, Visconti, and the presidency of PEN

Paris kept staging him. In March 1958 the English director Peter Brook opened Vu du pont — literally 'seen from the bridge', the French title of A View from the Bridge, Miller's tragedy of a Brooklyn dock worker who informs on his own relatives — at the Théâtre Antoine, a boulevard playhouse near the place de la République, again in an adaptation by Marcel Aymé, with the Italian actor Raf Vallone as Eddie Carbone and the Russian-born actress Lila Kedrova as his wife. On 20 January 1965 Après la chute — 'after the fall', the French title of After the Fall, which audiences read as drawn from the wreck of Miller's own second marriage — opened at the Théâtre du Gymnase on the grands boulevards, directed by the Italian film-maker Luchino Visconti, with Annie Girardot as Maggie, the self-destroying singer everyone took for Marilyn Monroe. Monroe had been dead two and a half years. The costumes were credited to Christian Dior — meaning the Paris fashion house of that name rather than the man, who had died in 1957.

Miller's marriage to Monroe ended in 1961; she died in 1962, the year he married the photographer Inge Morath, who remained his wife for forty years. In 1965 he was elected International President of PEN, the worldwide writers' association founded in 1921 whose Writers in Prison Committee, created in 1960, takes up the cases of writers jailed for what they have written. He held the office until 1969 and used it as a passport of a different kind — to Yugoslavia, to Moscow in 1967 to persuade Soviet writers to join, to Czechoslovakia in 1969, where he met the then-banned playwright Václav Havel. He kept writing until the end, took the Kennedy Center Honors — the annual American award for a lifetime's work in the performing arts — in 1984 and the Jerusalem Prize, given at Israel's international book fair to a writer whose work concerns the freedom of the individual, in 2003, and died at his Connecticut farmhouse on 10 February 2005. His archive — more than fifty notebooks, drafts of every play, and his own files on the House Un-American Activities Committee — went in 2018 to the Harry Ransom Center, the literary archive of the University of Texas at Austin.

Life events

  1. 1915

    Born in New York City on 17 October, to a Jewish coat manufacturer whose business the Depression destroys.

    — Miller Chronology

  2. 1934

    Enters the University of Michigan on saved warehouse wages; wins the Hopwood Award for drama twice before graduating in 1938.

    — Miller Chronology

  3. 1947

    All My Sons opens on Broadway and takes the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award — his first success after a play that closed in four performances.

    — Miller Chronology

  4. 1949

    Death of a Salesman premieres, directed by Elia Kazan with Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman, and wins the Pulitzer Prize, the Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Tony.

    — Miller Chronology; Awards and Honors

  5. 1953

    The Crucible opens on Broadway, taking the Salem witch trials of 1692 as a way of writing about the congressional hunt for Communists.

    — Miller Chronology

  6. 1954

    The State Department refuses him a passport for the Brussels premiere of The Crucible, citing rules against passports for suspected supporters of the Communist movement.

    — Associated Press, Playwright Arthur Miller Refused Visa For a Visit to Brussels to See His Play (1954); Miller Chronology

  7. 1954

    Les Sorcières de Salem opens at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt in Paris on 16 December — Marcel Aymé's adaptation, staged by Raymond Rouleau, with Yves Montand and Simone Signoret as the Proctors. It runs more than 360 times over two seasons.

    — Les sorcières de Salem [Spectacle] — Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, 1954; Les Sorcières de Salem, mise en scène Raymond Rouleau (1954); Julie Vatain-Corfdir, Les Montand-Signoret jouent Arthur Miller. La première française des Sorcières de Salem (2022)

  8. 1956

    Testifies before the House Un-American Activities Committee on 21 June, refusing to name others; announces during a recess that he will marry Marilyn Monroe before 13 July.

    — Allen Drury, Arthur Miller Admits Helping Communist-Front Groups in '40's (1956)

  9. 1957

    Convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to name names.

    — Miller Chronology; Arthur Miller Biography — 2001 Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities

  10. 1957

    Raymond Rouleau's film Les Sorcières de Salem is released, scripted and dialogued by Jean-Paul Sartre, again with Montand and Signoret — a French co-production with East Germany's DEFA studio.

    — Les Sorcières de Salem (1957); Miller Chronology

  11. 1958

    The United States Court of Appeals overturns the contempt conviction. In March, Peter Brook stages Vu du pont at the Théâtre Antoine in Paris with Raf Vallone.

    — Arthur Miller Biography — 2001 Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities; Vu du pont, mise en scène Peter Brook (1958)

  12. 1965

    Après la chute opens at the Théâtre du Gymnase in Paris on 20 January, directed by Luchino Visconti with Annie Girardot. The same year Miller is elected International President of PEN.

    — Après la chute, mise en scène Luchino Visconti (1965); PEN International's History

  13. 1969

    Retires as president of PEN after four years spent arguing for imprisoned and censored writers in Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.

    — Miller Chronology; PEN International's History

  14. 2005

    Dies of heart failure at his Roxbury, Connecticut farmhouse on 10 February, aged eighty-nine.

    — Miller Chronology

People they knew

Documented connections — every one carries its source.

Illustrated portrait of Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre

  • Philosopher
  • Author
  • Playwright
  • +1

Clashed with · 1957

Sartre wrote both the scenario and the dialogue for Les Sorcières de Salem (1957), Raymond Rouleau's film of Miller's play The Crucible, with Yves Montand and Simone Signoret as the Proctors; the Cinémathèque française credits him as scénariste and dialoguiste. Sartre rewrote the Salem hysteria as a class conflict, making the accused poor and the accusers propertied, and cut the Reverend Hale's reasoned turn against the court. Miller rejected the reading in print: the screenplay, he wrote in Timebends, seemed to him to toss an arbitrary Marxist mesh over the story that led to a few absurdities. This is a documented public disagreement over a single work, not a personal quarrel — the Atlas has no evidence that the two men ever met.

— Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (1987), p. 349; Julie Vatain-Corfdir, Les Montand-Signoret jouent Arthur Miller. La première française des Sorcières de Salem (2022); Les Sorcières de Salem (1957)

Questions about Arthur Miller

What is Death of a Salesman about?

The last day of Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old travelling salesman in Brooklyn who has spent his life believing that being well liked is the same as being successful, and who is now too worn out to drive his route. The play moves between his kitchen and his memories on the same stage, so the past keeps interrupting the present, and it ends with Willy killing himself for the insurance money he thinks will finally make him worth something to his son. It opened in 1949 with Lee J. Cobb in the part, directed by Elia Kazan, and won the Pulitzer Prize.

What is The Crucible about, and is it really about McCarthyism?

It dramatises the Salem witch trials of 1692, when a Massachusetts village executed nineteen people on the testimony of accusers who claimed to see their spirits. McCarthyism is the name later given, after Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, to the anti-Communist investigations and sackings that ran through American public life in the early 1950s. Miller wrote the play in 1952–53, while the House Un-American Activities Committee was pressing witnesses to name former Communist associates, and he never denied the parallel: a court that accepts unprovable evidence, and offers the accused a way out only if they implicate others. Three years after it opened, the committee subpoenaed Miller himself.

Was Arthur Miller convicted for refusing to name names?

Yes. He testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee on 21 June 1956, acknowledged that he had signed appeals put out by Communist-front groups in the 1940s, denied ever having been under Communist discipline, and refused to say who else had been at the meetings he attended. He was convicted of contempt of Congress in 1957. The United States Court of Appeals overturned the conviction in 1958.

Did Jean-Paul Sartre write a film of The Crucible?

He wrote the screenplay and the dialogue for Les Sorcières de Salem, the 1957 film of the play directed by Raymond Rouleau, with Yves Montand as John Proctor and Simone Signoret as his wife. The Cinémathèque française, the French national film archive, credits Sartre as both scénariste and dialoguiste — the writer of the screenplay and the writer of the spoken lines. Sartre recast the story as a class conflict, making the accused poor and their accusers propertied. Miller disliked it, writing in his memoir Timebends that the script threw an arbitrary Marxist mesh over the story and produced a few absurdities.

Why is The Crucible called Les Sorcières de Salem in France?

Because that is the title Marcel Aymé gave his French adaptation for the Paris stage in 1954 — it means 'The Witches of Salem'. The English word crucible, a vessel for melting metal at extreme heat, has no single French equivalent that also carries the sense of a severe test. Aymé's title stuck to the play, to Sartre's 1957 film, and to every French production since.

Did Arthur Miller go to Paris?

His plays got there before he could. In March 1954 the State Department refused him a passport to attend the Brussels premiere of The Crucible, so the Paris opening that December, and the Sartre film of 1957, both happened while he was confined to the United States. He travelled widely in Europe from 1956 onwards and, as president of PEN from 1965 to 1969, went repeatedly behind the Iron Curtain. Which of the Paris openings he attended in person the Atlas has not established.

Was Arthur Miller married to Marilyn Monroe?

Yes, from 1956 to 1961 — his second marriage, between Mary Grace Slattery and the photographer Inge Morath. He wrote the screenplay of The Misfits (1961) for Monroe; she divorced him that year and died in 1962. After the Fall (1964) put a version of the marriage on stage, and when Luchino Visconti staged it in Paris in 1965 the part was taken by Annie Girardot.

What did Arthur Miller do at PEN International?

He was elected International President of PEN — the worldwide association of writers founded in 1921 — in 1965, and served until 1969. The office made him a working advocate for censored and imprisoned writers through PEN's Writers in Prison Committee, set up in 1960, and took him to Yugoslavia, to Moscow in 1967 to recruit Soviet writers into the organisation, and to Czechoslovakia in 1969.

Sourced claims

Every connection the graph holds for Arthur, with the evidence behind it.

Clashed with · 1957

Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre wrote both the scenario and the dialogue for Les Sorcières de Salem (1957), Raymond Rouleau's film of Miller's play The Crucible, with Yves Montand and Simone Signoret as the Proctors; the Cinémathèque française credits him as scénariste and dialoguiste. Sartre rewrote the Salem hysteria as a class conflict, making the accused poor and the accusers propertied, and cut the Reverend Hale's reasoned turn against the court. Miller rejected the reading in print: the screenplay, he wrote in Timebends, seemed to him to toss an arbitrary Marxist mesh over the story that led to a few absurdities. This is a documented public disagreement over a single work, not a personal quarrel — the Atlas has no evidence that the two men ever met.

— Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (1987), p. 349; Julie Vatain-Corfdir, Les Montand-Signoret jouent Arthur Miller. La première française des Sorcières de Salem (2022); Les Sorcières de Salem (1957)

References

References

The sources below include biographies, scholarly essays, interviews, and primary materials that informed this page. They reflect both the historical record and ongoing critical conversations about Arthur Miller and their work.

  1. 1Miller Chronology

    The Arthur Miller Society

    The scholarly society's year-by-year chronology of Miller's life and work.

    View source

  2. 2Arthur Miller Biography — 2001 Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities

    National Endowment for the Humanities

    Institutional biography written when Miller gave the 2001 Jefferson Lecture.

    View source

  3. 3Les Montand-Signoret jouent Arthur Miller. La première française des Sorcières de Salem

    Transatlantica, 2 | 2022, 2022

    Peer-reviewed reconstruction of the 1954 Paris production and of Miller's reaction to Sartre's film.

    View source

  1. 4Playwright Arthur Miller's Archive Comes to the Harry Ransom Center

    Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, 2018

    The repository that now holds his papers.

    View source

  2. 5Timebends: A Life

    Methuen, 1987

    Miller's own memoir, source of his verdict on Sartre's screenplay.

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Why these sources are here

These references anchor the page in the documented record and in the scholarly conversations around Arthur Miller. Every claim on this page traces back to one or more of the works listed here.

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