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Biography
The playwright was born in Harlem, on 17 October 1915, and grew up during the American Depression, the economic crisis of the 1930s when many enterprises were bankrupted. The economic climate affected his own family when his father's clothing business experienced financial difficulties. Arthur Miller's father, an all but illiterate immigrant from Poland, employed nearly a thousand workers to make women's coats. Arthur Miller himself worked briefly as a salesman, and his experience as a schoolboy of working in a car parts warehouse for a miserly sum is one which clearly echoed in his plays. Through this succession of small jobs he earned his way to university. Many of Arthur Miller's plays focus on aspects of the Jewish experience, although Arthur Miller's own Jewish background does not seem to feature greatly in his plays. The economic crash of the Depression put great strain on relationships in the Miller family.
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