NEW YORK, Feb 11: Playwright Arthur Miller, who died on Thursday at age 89, won international acclaim for work such as "Death of a Salesman" and "The Crucible" that tapped into the malaise of post-war America.

Miller led a colourful and controversial career that included a well-publicized romance with starlet Marilyn Monroe and bitter squabbles over his links to the Communist party in the United States.

Despite decades of success, however, Miller remained preoccupied with the question of failure and personal tragedy in the American working class - a theme etched into his soul growing up in the midst of the Great Depression.

Even sympathetic critics often saw his work as a nearly Marxist critique of American capitalism, and his greatest plays portrayed "average" men and women ground down by an unforgiving system of business and politics.

The son of Jewish immigrants of Polish origin, Miller was born in New York on October 17, 1915. His early years were marked by the desperation of his father, whose garment business collapsed amid the Depression, and the physical, moral and financial strains those difficult years placed on society at large.

After university in Michigan, Miller returned to New York and his first play, "The Man Who Had All The Luck," opened in 1944. The play, about a financially successful man who is nevertheless unhappy, presaged one of the great themes of his life's work and was met with scathing reviews.

Two years later, however, his first Broadway production, "All My Sons," was also his first success. The play, about a businessman who sells defective parts to the US military, touched a chord with post-war American audiences.

But it was "Death of Salesman" in 1949 that made Miller's career. The story of Willy Loman, a failed businessman who looks back on his life before killing himself to leave insurance money for his son, was compared to Dostoevsky and Shakespeare, and won the Pulitzer Prize.

The tale of Loman's desire to end up "number-one" - and his son's rejection of that desire as "all wrong" - ran for hundreds of performances and was translated into dozens of languages. It made Miller an instant millionaire.

After the economic boom of the 1980s, Miller's work reached a new generation as both revivals and new plays brought him a second wave of success with American audiences. He also remained a committed political activist.

Even sceptics like leading critic Robert Brustein, who decades later sniffed at Miller's "plight of the exploited common man," was appreciative of the playwright's emotional power in depicting the difficult bonds of family. Miller won many major artistic awards in the United States and his work was hailed as a watershed, bringing a stinging humanist realism to the American stage. -AFP