Biography Essay

Arthur Miller was born in Manhattan, the son of a middle-class ladies' coat manufacturer and a schoolteacher mother. He has a brother who became a businessman and a sister who was an actress. Although he went to grammar school in then fashionable Harlem, Miller was forced to move to Brooklyn when his father suffered major losses right before the Depression. Today, over half a century after his move to Brooklyn, Miller lives the life of a country squire on 400 acres of Connecticut countryside, where he gardens, mows, plants evergreens, works as a carpenter, and writes four to six hours every morning in an isolated studio. There is both a real and metaphoric sense of planting new roots, but he remains haunted by the old. The Depression still troubles him: "It seems easy to tell how it was to live in those years, but I have made...