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Arthur Miller, one of the leading American playwrighters of the 20th century, was born in October of 1915 in New York City. His father was a ladies-wear manufacturer who was ruined during the economic collapse of the 1930s. As a young man, Miller was shown that beiing surrounded by poverty can mean insecurity of modern existence during the Great Depression. After having finished high, he worked in a warehouse, in order tp earn enough money to finance his studies at the University of Michigan, where he began to write plays.
Miller\'s first public success was "Focus" (1945), a novel dealing with anti-Semitism. Two years later Miller succeeded as an important playwrighter with "All My Sons", a drama about a manufacturer of faulty war materials.
"Death of a Salesman" in 1949 secured Miller´s reputation as one of the nation\'s foremost playwrighters and mixes the tradition of social realism with a experimental structure that includes fluid leaps in time. The protagonist, Willy Loman, drifts into memories of his sons as teenagers. Miller won a Tony Award for "Death of a Salesman" as well as a Pulitzer Prize. The play has been used frequently in film, television and stage versions which included such famous actors as Dustin Hoffman. After "Death of a Salesman" Miller wrote his most politically significant work, "The Crucible" (1953), a tale of the Salem witch trials that contains obvious analogies to the McCarthy anti-Communist hearings of Miller\'s contemporary society. The next stage in Miller´s life to mention is his marriage with the actress Marilyn Monroe. The two got divorced in 1961, the year of her death. After divorcing Monroe, Miller wed Ingeborg Morath, to whom he is still married. The two have a son and a daughter.
Miller also wrote the plays "A Memory of Two Mondays" and the short "A View from the Bridge", which were both put to stag in 1955. Other famous works are: "After the Fall" (1964), "The Price" (1967), "The Archbishop\'s
Ceiling" (1977) and "TheAmerican Clock" (1980). His most recent works include the plays "The Ride Down Mt. Morgan" (1991), "Broken Glass" (1993), which won the Olivier Award for Best Play and "The Last Yankee" (1993).
In some of his plays he deals with the problem of the American Dream, for example in such as "The Last Yankee" and "Death of a salesman". Those books will be examined in the following.
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