She, too, would make a career in the theater, becoming an accomplished actress under the stage name Joan Copeland.Īfter Isidore Miller’s business failed, the family moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn, where Miller attended high school while living among relatives and family friends, who would become a source of inspiration for much of his early drama, particularly the Loman family tragedy in Death of a Salesman. Their sister, Joan, was the youngest and enjoyed her father’s favor as a child.

Miller’s older brother, Kermit, was a stronger student and better athlete than his younger brother in their early years. Also, his father’s meteoric rise and fall and the corresponding impact on the family became the basis for the playwright’s repeated exploration of the volatile dynamics of father-son relationships.įrom his mother, whose parents also had emigrated from Poland, Miller learned to value high culture, education, and the power of the written word. This sudden collapse of the familiar world was a crucial experience in Miller’s life, and he would later frequently draw on the tensions that were created by that severe economic crisis in his writings. Miller’s father provided his family with a luxurious lifestyle until his business failed at the start of the Great Depression. 10 February 2005 in Roxbury, Connecticut), award-winning writer who earned fame as one of America’s greatest dramatists for the two masterpieces Death of a Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953).īorn in New York City, Miller was one of the three children of Isidore Miller, a Polish immigrant who made a fortune in the garment industry, and Augusta (Barnett) Miller, a schoolteacher.

Miller after the fall