Author of literary jewels such as The Death of a Salesman or The Salem Witches, and debunker of the American dream, he was a man committed to the time he lived until the end of his days. An artistic and media figure, due to his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, he also aroused political interest due to his left-wing opinions, which earned him being investigated during McCarthyism. The best-known and most revered contemporary playwright was born in New York.
In Timebends, his autobiography published in 1987, he was 72 years old at the time, Miller defines himself as a kind of Jewish Don Quixote who grew up in Harlem, among Puerto Ricans and blacks, who worked on the Brooklyn docks and married to Marilyn Monroe. This self-portrait demonstrates the relevance that the well-known and revered writer, chosen best playwright of the 20th century by the Royal National Theatre, attaches to the tortuous relationship he had for five years with the Hollywood star. Among the icons was the game.
'Each man is worth what he can sell,' declared seven years earlier one of the characters in what is considered his masterpiece, Death of a Salesman (1949), winner of the Pulitzer Prize. We don't know if Miller put this theory into practice when he married Marilyn, but without a doubt his union with the actress catapulted him to fame, making him a true media figure.
It was 1956, Miller was forty years old and at that time he was at the peak of his career after publishing The Witches of Salem in 1953. The playwright had used his pages to denounce the investigation of the United States Congress into the subversive activities directed by McCarthy after appearing himself before the Committee on Un-American Activities, which would sentence him for contempt. His left-wing ideas had compromised him politically. Miller, a man of principles, refuses to give up his ideals. Conceived in the bosom of a family of Viennese emigrants ruined in the Great Depression when he was barely 14 years old, he had been forced to pay for his journalism studies by working. In this context, he would forge the ideology of which he would become the demystifier of the American dream par excellence.
Beyond Marilyn, from whom he separates in 1961, life goes on for Miller. A year later, he married what would be his third wife, the press photographer Ingeborg Morath, with whom he would have his third offspring, a girl. From his first marriage, he was the father of a daughter and a son. The playwright puts the final touch on his sentimental life, as theatrical as his works, with his marriage contracted a few months before his death, which occurred on February 11, 2005, with whom he had been his partner since 2002, the 34-year-old artist Agnes Barley. Death surprises 'young' Arthur at the age of 89 at his Roxbury farm, an 18th-century building that he had purchased with Marilyn during the second year of their marriage. Just four years before, in 2001, at the age of 86, Miller had played a brief role as a Jew in the film Eden based on one of his novels. The fourth estate echoes the passing of the 'giant of the American theater'.
His epitaph could include a statement he made in an interview published on our pages on the occasion of his being awarded the Prince of Asturias Award: 'I am nothing more than a writer, an American writer.
