Arthur Miller, the playwright who wrote Death of a Salesman and was briefly married to Marilyn Monroe, died yesterday at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut of heart failure. He was 89.
Often called America's greatest living playwright, Miller was 33 when he wrote one of the quintessential plays in the 20th century canon, Death of a Salesman, about Willy Loman, a man struggling with his past inequities while facing his own mortality and worth. The original 1949 play was directed by Elia Kazan and Miller won the Pulitzer Prize for his work.

Miller's other best-known play was The Crucible, about the repression and mass hysteria in Salem, Massachusetts that resulted in the Salem witch trials. It was later made into a film of the same name starring his son-in-law, Daniel Day-Lewis (who married Miller's daughter, filmmaker Rebecca Miller, in 1996).

Arthur Miller was born in Manhattan on October 17, 1915, one of three children in a middle-class Jewish family that had emigrated from Poland. He worked as a laborer in an automobile parts warehouse and on the night shift of the Brooklyn Naval Yards. It was through hard work that he gained entrance into college, which enabled him to pursue his love of writing, while the Hopwood Award, a university prize for best student play with a purse of $250 that he won--twice--made him enough money to see his degree through.

Upon leaving college he married his college sweetheart, Mary Grace Slattery, and promptly had two children. His first plays were summarily rejected by producers and Miller had to keep afloat by returning to the Navy Yard. Success finally came with All My Sons, a play about the tragic deaths of Army pilots due to a mechanical defect and the politics and chicanery that followed in their aftermath.

But it was Salesman that catapulted Miller into the upper stratosphere of fame. In addition to the Pulitzer, the play won the Tony and the Drama Critics' Circle awards. He would never equal it and lived, for some time, struggling in the shadow of its singular acclaim.

The Crucible, a thinly-veiled indictment of the House Committee on un-American Activities, was somewhat of a success (bad attendance yet it won the Tony), but it caused a permanent rift with Miller and Elia Kazan (who saw it as a personal rebuke on his decision to name names to the committee).

Miller refused to testify before the committee, placing him in contempt of court, but he was engaged in an even more tumultuous struggle with his new bride, Marilyn Monroe. Their marriage lasted four years in which Miller wrote virtually nothing save the screenplay for The Misfits, a play about Gay (played by Clark Gable), an aging cowboy, and Roslyn (Monroe), an aging beauty with a heart-of-gold. John Huston directed it but Monroe was offended by the character of Roslyn, which she thought was a caricature of her. Their marriage ended shortly after, and Monroe was dead of an overdose six months later. Miller went on to remarry Inge Morath, a still photographer who was working on The Misfits, a year later. He had a daughter, Rebecca, with her, but Monroe still seemed to haunt him. In 1964 he wrote After the Fall, which was deemed his most autobiographical play and detailed the trials of living with a drug-addicted, emotionally needy blonde. Miller was roundly criticized for capitalizing on their relationship though he insisted the characters were entirely fictional. That pretense fell when, in October 2004, Miller premiered "Finishing the Picture," a play based upon the making of The Misfits and the dissolution of his marriage to Monroe. It was again attacked as a scathing and unfair criticism of a woman dead nearly 35 years, though it had its defenders as well. Miller's last lines in the sad and beautiful The Misfits, the last full roles for both Monroe and Gable, are not Miller's best known, but they may serve as an epitaph for a playwright who struggled to shine a light on the human condition:

Roslyn: Which way is home?

Gay: God bless you girl.

Roslyn: How do you find your way back in the dark?

Gay: Just head for that big star straight on. The highway's under it. It'll take us right home.