Miller's plays generally address social issues and center around an individual in a social dilemma, or an individual at the mercy of society. During this time, Miller has written twenty-six plays, a novel entitled Focus (1945), several travel journals, a collection of short stories entitled I Don't Need You Anymore (1967), and an autobiography entitled Timebends: A Life (1987). Miller's prolific writing career spans a period of over sixty years. Miller died on February 10, 2005, of heart failure. Congress closed the Federal Theatre late in 1939. The Federal Theatre provided work for unemployed writers, actors, directors, and designers. After he left the University of Michigan, Miller wrote plays for the Federal Theatre in 1939. In addition to hosting a radio program, Miller held a variety of jobs during his early career. At school, he studied journalism, became the night editor of the Michigan Daily, and began experimenting with theater. Miller worked a variety of odd jobs - including hosting a radio program - before the University of Michigan accepted him. He applied to Cornell University and the University of Michigan, but both schools refused him admission. Miller graduated from high school in New York in 1933.

Financial hardship compelled the Miller family to move to Brooklyn in 1929. Miller's father had established a successful clothing store upon coming to America, so the family enjoyed wealth however, this prosperity ended with the Wall Street Crash of 1929. As Walter says, in a line that seems to express Miller’s meaning: “We invent ourselves, Vic, to wipe out what we know.” The character who is closest to reality is the 89-year-old second-hand dealer Gregory Solomon: a blissfully comic creation who, at first, appears to have wandered in from a Neil Simon play, but who is well aware this is his last chance to defy time.Arthur Miller was born in Harlem on October 17, 1915, the son of Polish immigrants, Isidore and Augusta Miller. Surrounded by a mountain of mementoes, nicely realised in Simon Higlett’s design, the sibling reunion is fraught with resentment but also shows the two men have been playing self-assigned roles. Walter is the brother who got out to enjoy a successful career as a wealthy surgeon. Victor, married to an alcohol-dependent wife, is a New York cop who sacrificed his studies to look after a dad ruined by the Great Depression. What we now see are two long-estranged brothers meeting to divide the family’s possessions. If it is, it has stood the test of time and now emerges, in Jonathan Church’s superbly acted production with David Suchet in the show-stealing role of an old furniture-dealer, as one of Miller’s best plays: an exploration of our need for sustaining illusions because, as he himself wrote, the truth is too terrible to face.Īs in an Ibsen play, much of the real action has happened in the past. On its Broadway debut in 1968, Arthur Miller’s play was dubbed by one critic “a museum piece”.

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