Arthur Miller Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Plays

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Dramascripts Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Arthur Miller
Arthur Asher Miller was born October 17, 1915 and was an essayist and playwright in the twentieth century American theater. He was born in Harlem, in the New York City borough of Manhattan, and was the second of three kids of Isidore and Augusta Miller. He was Jewish, and of Polish-Jewish descent.

As a result of the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the family lost close to everything they had and moved to Gravesend, Brooklyn. As a teen, he delivered bread each morning before school so he could help out the family.

After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in the year 1932, he worked multiple menial jobs in order to pay for college tuition at the University of Michigan. Once he graduated, around 1936, he started working as a psychiatric aide and as a copywriter before he got faculty jobs at New York University and University of New Hampshire.

While at the University of Michigan, he first majored in journalism and worked for The Michigan Daily, the student newspaper, as well as the Gargoyle Humor Magazine. He wrote “No Villain”, his first play, during this time. He switched majors to English, and won the Avery Hopwood Award for No Villain. It brought him his very first recognition and got him to consider the idea that he might have a career as a playwright.

He was exempted from military service during the second world war due to a high school football injury to his left kneecap.

At his small studio in Roxbury Connecticut, which he built in 1948, he wrote the first act of Death of a Salesman. And within six weeks, he had finished the rest of the play, which is now a classic of world theater.

Among his most popular plays include “A View from the Bridge”, “All My Sons”, “The Crucible”, and “Death of a Salesman”. He also wrote a number of screenplays, most notably “The Misfits”.

Arthur was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, was given the Prince of Asturias Award, and won a St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. He was also given the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in 199, the Praemium Imperiale prize in 2002, and the Jerusalem Prize in 2003. He won two Tony Awards for Best Author for “Death of a Salesman” and “All My Sons”.
Death of a Salesman was also the first to win the Tony, New York Drama Circle Critics’ Award, and the Pulitzer for drama. His play “The Man Who Had All the Luck” won the Theatre Guild’s National Award.

He was married three times. Mary Slattery from 1940 until 1956. Most notably, he was married to Marilyn Monroe, from 1956 until 1961. And finally to Inge Morath, from 1962 until her death in 2002, who was a photographer that he met while working on “The Misfits”, and worked documenting the production. Arthur had four children, two with his first wife (Jane and Daniel) and two with his third (Rebecca and Daniel).

His 1964 play, called “After the Fall”, is said to be a deeply personal account of his experiences during his marriage to Monroe. And despite not talking about Monroe during interviews, he talks about his experiences with her in an autobiographical work called “Timebends”, which was published in the year 1987.

In the year 1985, “Death of a Salesman” was adapted for television, airing on CBS and drew in 25 million viewers. “The Crucible” was made into a movie starring Miller’s son-in-law Daniel Day-Lewis. Also in the movie were Paul Scofield, Winona Ryder, Joan Allen, and Bruce Davison. Miller spent much of 1996 working the movie’s screenplay.

He died at the age of 89 in Roxbury, Connecticut on February 10, 2005 (the 56 the anniversary of “Death of a Salesman”’s Broadway debut) of bladder cancer and heart failure.

“Focus” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 1945. One of the first books that directly confronted American anti-Semitism.

While World War II comes to a close, anti-Semitism is thriving in Brooklyn, New York. Here, Newman, who is an American of English descent, floats through a world of multi ethnic neighborhoods and is indifferent to the racism all around him. That is, until he starts wearing glasses that render him “Jewish” in the eyes of other people, and making him the target of anti-Semitic persecution.

While he and his wife finds some friendship and support from one Jewish immigrant, Newman slowly but surely starts to comprehend the racial hatreds surrounding him.

This is a sincere and strong novel that bursts with indignation. This is just as dramatic and gripping as some of Miller’s better known plays and is a well constructed, powerful novel. Miller delivers an enlightening and thought-provoking story, and despite being written over seventy years ago, it is still relevant today.

“After the Fall” is a play that was released in the year 1964. Quentin’s a successful lawyer in New York, however inside of his mind he struggles with his sense of guilt and the shadows from his previous relationships. One of these is the ill-fated marriage he had to the beautiful and charming Maggie, who went from operating a switchboard to become the self-destructive star, a singer that everybody wanted to have a piece of.

“After the Fall” is seen usually as the most explicitly autobiographical of Miller’s work, and Maggie is the unflinching portrait of Marilyn Monroe, just two years after death.

“The Last Yankee” is a play that was released in the year 1991. In the waiting room of one mental institution two men are sitting. They are there to visit their wives who both suffer from depression. Frick, who is a no-nonsense successful businessman is stunned to learn that Leroy Hamilton, the younger guy, is a carpenter by trade and a fairly contented one too. This is despite the fact that he is descended from one of the Founding Fathers of America.

As we meet their respective wives, the play opens up some of the psycho-moral paradoxes that haunts contemporary life.