Arthur Miller was one of the leading American playwrights of the twentieth century. He was born in October 1915 in New York City. His father, a manufacturer of women's clothing, lost everything in the economic collapse of the 1930s. Living through young adulthood during the Great Depression, Miller was shaped by the poverty that surrounded him and demonstrated the fragility and vulnerability of human existence. After graduating from high school, Miller worked in a warehouse so that he could earn enough money to attend the University of Michigan, where he began to write plays.
Miller's first play to make it to Broadway, The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), was a dismal failure,...
