By Katie McGerr

Arthur Asher Miller was born in Harlem on October 17, 1915. The son of a successful clothing manufacturer, Miller and his siblings - an older brother, Kermit, and a younger sister, Joan - enjoyed a privileged childhood in what was then an "idyllic" Manhattan neighborhood with "a front yard of one of the most beautiful parks in the country."

Things changed after the stock market crash of 1929, which closed his father's business and forced the family to relocate to Brooklyn.

"There were three suicides on the little block where we lived," Miller recalled of his teenage years in the Depression. "Once the money stopped, their identity was gone."

Miller saved for college with whatever work he could find: truck driver, delivery-boy, warehouse clerk, singer. In 1934, Miller entered the University of Michigan where, in search of a forum for his increasingly radical views, he began to write plays.

Upon graduating, Miller joined the Federal Theatre, a New Deal project for unemployed artists. In 1940, he married his college girlfriend, Mary Grace Slattery.

Prevented from military service by a high-school football injury, Miller worked in the Brooklyn Navy yard during WWII. He continued to write and, in 1944, his play The Man Who Had All the Luck (about a young auto mechanic in the Midwest) opened on Broadway.

Though it closed after four performances, Miller subsequently had six Broadway successes in the next 10 years: All My Sons in 1947, for which Miller received his first Tony Award; Death of a Salesman in 1949, which won a Tony and the Pulitzer Prize; an adaptation of Ibsen's Enemy of the People in 1950; The Crucible in 1953, which earned Miller his third Tony Award; and A View From the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays in 1955.

Miller had no new plays on Broadway until After the Fall in 1964; the nine-year interim was a turbulent time for him, both personally and politically.

In 1956, Miller divorced Mary Slattery (with whom he had two children, Jane and Robert) and married Marilyn Monroe. That year, he was also called before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

In 1961 Miller divorced Monroe and, a year later, he married Austrian photographer Inge Morath, with whom he had a daughter, Rebecca, in 1963. In 1966, the couple had a son, Daniel, who was born with Down Syndrome and immediately institutionalized; Miller never publicly acknowledged his existence.

The following year, Miller wrote The Price, which, when it opened on Broadway in 1968, would be his biggest success since Death of a Salesman.

Miller has said that The Price, like all of his plays, was a response to the particular historical circumstances in which he was writing. Yet the public and political drama of the late 1960s seems hardly to infiltrate the walls of the Franz's apartment as Solomon makes his appraisal.

Rather, The Price reaches back in the past to the Depression, which impacted Miller's childhood so deeply.

As the story of the Franz family progresses, it picks up pieces of issues that Miller explored in earlier plays. The Price functions, in some ways, as a thematic appraisal of Miller's past as a playwright.

The figurative presence of Victor and Walter's father speaks to the complexity of parent-child relationships exposed in All My Sons. Victor's career in the police force hearkens back to the failed American Dream from Death of a Salesman (see "The Prices We Paid: Miller's Fixation on History").

Solomon's presence as an outsider assessing the Franz family is reminiscent of Alfieri's role in A View from the Bridge. And the underlying questions of betrayal, guilt and responsibility for the past echo the questions posed in The Crucible and After the Fall.

With his next play, The Archbishop's Ceiling (1977), Miller responded more explicitly to contemporary political issues. In his final plays, however, he returned to exploring the past - both its expression and it suppression: The American Clock (1980) and Broken Glass (1994) are set, respectively, at the Depression and the beginnings of WWII. The Ride Down Mount Morgan (1992) looks back on the life of a dying man; Finishing the Picture (2004) is reminiscent of Miller's experience in Hollywood in the early 1960s.

"I've come out of the playwriting tradition which is Greek and Ibsen where the past is the burden of man and it's got to be placed on the stage so that he can grapple with it," Miller said of his writing. "The job of the artist . . . is to remind people what they have chosen to forget."

Miller died of congestive heart failure in his home in Roxbury, CT, on February 10, 2005 - the 107th birthday of another "political" playwright, Berthold Brecht, and the 56th anniversary of Death of a Salesman's Broadway debut.

As the coincidence of dates prompted Tony Kushner to remark, Miller always "demanded that we must be able to answer, on behalf of our plays, our endeavors, our lives."