Arthur Miller Essay, Research Paper

Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller found himself one day writing a play somehow based on a true story in his youth. With this he adds suspencion to the play, by adding creative scenes where his style is shown. After the play’s success, Miller’s mother Augusta, found an early manuscript called, “In Memorian”.In Memorian, was a forgotten autobiographical fragment that Miller had written when he was around 17 years old. The biographicla is about a Miltex salesman, called Schoenzeit, who had once asked Miller for subway fare. The real Schoenzeit killed himself the next day by throwing himself in front of The Train. This was to become the first sightings of what would become Willy Loman. Of the historical and personal forces that made up of “Death os a Salesman”, none was more important than a moment when Miller’s uncle, Manny Newman accosted him in the lobby of the Colonial Theater in Boston. When Newman approched Miller he had not seen him for more than a decade. Manny encounter inspired in Miller only the infirmation of a new, slashing sense of dramatic form.

Arthur Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in New York City, and grew up in a middle-class household on 112th Street in Manhattan. His father was an Austran immigrantm who for most of Arthur’s youth, succesfully manufactured a ladies’ coat company. Augusta, his mather, was a school teacher before she married Isiodure and according to Miller, was a good reader. She hired a Columbia University student for two dollars a week to discuss novels with her. Arthur lived a comfortable middle-class life until age fourteen. Isidure before become depressed after failer of his husband’s business. Kermit and Arhur had to get a job, and the family had to move out of their home.

Miller wrote that the depression made him awared that life was often a struggle against powerful social forces outside of the family. He later maved to Brooklyn and playyed football for Madison high School. He focus on his atletic skills more than his studies. After his rejection to Michigan University, he took odd jobs, where he witnessed first-hand how salesman where often dismissed or ordered about by insensative buyers. Between jobs he started reading voraciously, particulary Russian writers. This started his dream of becoming a writer. In college, Miller began a quest to understand how society changed, how it influenced the individual, and how it could be improved.

“This new dramtic style, called Subjective Realism, was made possible only when designer Jo Mielziner conceived of a way to make the physical changes from present to past as instantaneous on the set as the time changes in Willy’s mind. Mielzer achieved the change in time almost entirely through the use of light rather than through traditional set changes, flooding the stage with amber light and projection of green leaves during the memory scenes. To darken Loman house with the threating shapes of towering apartment house during the scenes in the present, they also use projection of green leaves. The new staging created a tense energy on the stage that emphasized the inherent conflicts in Miller’s play between past and present. The past and the present can also be compared as objective and subjective, and the realistic and the expressionistic.”(Murphy)