NAME: Arthur Miller

AGE: The curtains went down at 89

NATIONALITY: American

CLAIM TO FAME: One of the greatest American playwrights

ARTHUR Miller, who for more than five decades moved audiences around the world by his plays illuminating the agonies of the common man, died on February 10 at the age of 89.

The Pulitzer Prize winner captured the American century in his work which probed the moral conscience of his country, touching issues ranging from anti-Semitism and McCarthyism to his personal demons. Miller is often called an American Ibsen for his passionate morality and distrust of social institutions.

Miller wrote plays that everyone, whatever their stature or educational background, could relate to. Thus, they are among the most widely read, produced and loved of the past century: Death of a Salesman, A View From the Bridge, The Crucible, All My Sons, to name a few, with his last one, Finishing the Picture, opening late last year. His writings always addressed the weightiest matters of conscience, the anguish and tragedies of ordinary men and women struggling for dignity and a sense of community in an increasingly dehumanized and impersonal world often beyond their understanding. They were a literary reflection of an era of metamorphosis and redefinition in America following the victory in World War II.

His characters were good people who frequently acted badly under pressure. They were insightful, but they had blind spots. They avoided reality and denied the truth when it was painful. They were assertive, yet indecisive; aggressive, but also timid. His most famous character was of Willy Loman, the deluded aging salesman whose struggle for the American dream had made many theatre-goers weep in Death of a Salesman. The 1949 Pulitzer Prize-winner play is celebrated for its transformation of theatrical style into a more fluid form, unbounded by conventional notions of space and time, which became known as subjective realism. However, his career had ups and down, both due to his personal and political involvements. In 1956, following his marriage to Monroe, Miller’s playwriting career went into an eclipse. The marriage was troubled and tempestuous and the couple was hounded relentlessly by the media. Monroe’s dependence on barbiturates and her profound emotional problems compounded their difficulties. In 1961 he wrote the movie script for The Misfits as a last-ditch effort to save the marriage and Monroe’s life. It was a box-office failure and soon Monroe also filed for divorce. Marrying three times, Miller’s most enduring union was with Inge Morath, his wife and sometime creative partner for 40 years, until her death in 2002.

He also wrote several screenplays, including an adaptation of The Crucible that starred Winona Ryder and his son-in-law Daniel Day-Lewis.

Politically engaged during most of his career, Miller served as a delegate to the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and was an eloquent opponent of the Vietnam War. In the late 1960s, as international president of PEN, an association for novelists, essayists and poets, he became an advocate for politically oppressed writers in Russia and elsewhere. In 2000, he travelled to Havana to discuss human rights with Fidel Castro.

A lacklustre student, Miller read nothing more serious than Tom Swift through high school. It was Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov that he read on the long subway rides to work that changed his view of the world but convinced him that writing was his destiny. Miller’s creative spirit never flagged — to the end, he remained a tireless thinker and writer of all forms, churning out countless books, stories, essays and articles. — Ambreen Arshad