death of a salesman act 1 scene 1 script

Miller switched his major to English, and subsequently won the Avery Hopwood Award for No Villain. It was during this time that he wrote his first play, No Villain. After graduating in 1932 from Abraham Lincoln High School, he worked at several menial jobs to pay for his college tuition.Īt the University of Michigan, Miller first majored in journalism and worked as a reporter and night editor for the student paper, the Michigan Daily. As a teenager, Miller delivered bread every morning before school to help the family.

In the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the family lost almost everything and moved to Gravesend, Brooklyn. The family, including his younger sister Joan, lived on East 110th Street in Manhattan and owned a summer house in Far Rockaway, Queens. His father, a mostly illiterate but moderately wealthy businessman, owned a women's clothing store employing 400 people. Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, a period during which he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Principe de Asturias Award, and was married to Marilyn Monroe.Īrthur Asher Miller was born, in Harlem, New York City, the second of three children of Isidore and Augusta Miller, Polish-Jewish immigrants. He was a prominent figure in American theatre, writing dramas that include plays such as All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), and A View from the Bridge (one-act, 1955 revised two-act, 1956). Jerusalem Prize Principe de Asturias Prize (Spain)Īrthur Asher Miller was an American playwright and essayist. Of the Arts Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize York Drama Circle Critics Award National Medal

Awards-Tony Award (twice) Pulitizer Prize New.

He has given us a figure whose name has become a symbol for a kind of majestic grandiosity-and a play that compresses epic extremems of humor and anguish, promise and loss, between the four walls of an American living room. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial. Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater.

Death of a salesman act 1 scene 1 script