As noted in Encyclopaedia Judaica on Arthur Miller {1997} [CD–ROM]:
“Arthur Miller… U.S. playwright. He was born in New York City. Miller worked in a Michigan automobile factory to finance his studies, became a newspaper editor, and first began writing in the late 1930s. He acquired an international reputation after World War II, following the publication of two plays and of Focus (1945), a novel about anti–Semitism. The play All My songs (1947) revealed his ability to portray characters involved in emotional conflicts, but his reputation was really established with Death of a Salesman (1949), which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The play, later made into a motion picture, owed its success to the delineation of Willy Loman, the unsuccessful traveling salesman, and was regarded as an indictment of the false sense of values of American life.
In 1950, engaged by the problem of freedom of speech, Miller wrote an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, and in 1953, his own play The Crucible, he turned to the Salem witch trials of 1692, and spoke for freedom of conscience during the period of Senator McCarthy’s anti–Communist campaign. This play was screened as the Witches of Salem. A View from the Bridge (1957) again won a Pulitzer Prize. It showed Miller still striving for significant realistic drama and imaginative dramatic form. The film script, The Misfits (1961), written after his marriage to the screen star Marilyn Monroe, and acted in by her and Clark Gable, was an unusually sensitive, though commercially unsuccessful, study of loneliness and divorce. Miller returned to the theater with an autobiographical drama, After the Fall (1964), based largely on his life with Marilyn Monroe, whom he had divorced in 1962, and relating his own conflicts in love and friendship to the state of the world. Incident at Vichy (1966) dealt with the arrest of a number of Frenchmen, including some Jews, during the Nazi occupation. The Price (1968), depicting a dramatic conflict between two brothers, had as a central character an old Jew who acted as a wise commentator.
Miller stated his intention as a dramatist as being to “bring to the stage the thickness, awareness, and complexity of the novel.” He endeavored to give postwar American drama depth of purpose and content, and a sense of tragic conflict in terms of contemporary American life. Widely regarded in the 1950s as America’s leading dramatist, his reputation faded somewhat in the 1960s as realistic drama itself passed out of critical fashion. The 1980s, however, saw a return to appreciation of Miller’s contribution to Twentieth Century Theater. Other plays include The American Clock, The Archbishop’s Ceiling, Danger: Memory, Two–Way Mirror, The Ride Down Mount Morgan, The Last Yankee, and Broken Glass. For the collected edition of his plays published in 1958, he wrote a 50–page introduction, which clarified his purpose and explained his methods of work. Translated into many languages, the plays were internationally popular. Miller was elected president of the International P.E.N. Club in 1965, in which position he strove vigorously to organize protests against literary censorship and repression all over the world.”