The acclaimed playwright and U-M grad Arthur Miller was born this day in 1915. While attending the U-M he paid his way through school feeding lab mice. His first play, written for a contest, ended up on Broadway. Other than his short marriage to Marilyn Monroe he is best known for his characterization of Willy Loman in the play “Death of a Salesman”, a man, he said, who was “riding on a smile and a shoeshine”. In 2007, his alma mater opened a performance theatre named after him. It carries the proviso that no other theatre will ever carry his name. Mittenlit has previously reviewed a biography of Miller which you can read by clicking here. While at the University of Michigan, Miller worked as a reporter for the Michigan Daily, the campus newspaper. He won the Avery Hopwood Award twice for his writing. Miller always had deep affection for the University of Michigan (could it be because he was “waitlisted”) and in 1985 he established the Arthur Miller Award and in 1999 the Arthur Miller Award for Dramatic Writing. He died in 2005.
Read here and here Arthur Miller’s own take on what the University of Michigan meant to him as a writer. “Death of a Salesmen” which premiered in 1949 won both the Tony and the Pulitzer Prize.
