WITH THAT LINE, the playwright Arthur Miller (1915–2005) exposed the emptiness of the American Dream through the voice of Willy Loman, the lead character in Death of a Salesman (1949). The traveling man who insisted that “a salesman is got to dream,” Loman stood for a generation of Americans whose sense of worth was measured only in material success. Think you know Arthur Miller and his plays? If so, this little quiz shouldn’t be a hard sell.
1. Which Hollywood starlet married Arthur Miller in 1956?
2. Which Arthur Miller play, set in colonial times, attacked the anti-Communist hysteria of the McCarthy era?
3. Which director, well known for his work in Hollywood, won Tony awards for his productions of All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949) ?
4. Miller’s An Enemy of the People (1950) was an adaptation of an 1881 play by which Norwegian dramatist?
5. Who did Miller say were “people who can’t sing or dance”?
6. Which Miller play was inspired by a notable failed marriage?
ANSWERS
1. Marilyn Monroe. The couple divorced in 1961, a year and a half before Monroe’s death.
2. The Crucible (1953), a drama about the Salem witch trials. Several years after the debut of The Crucible, Arthur Miller was called to testify before the House of Representatives’ Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, where he refused to identify other writers as Communists.
3. Elia Kazan, who went on to direct films like A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954), and East of Eden (1955). Kazan and Miller were close friends, but they became estranged after Kazan identified eight of his colleagues as Communists in his 1952 HUAC testimony.
4. Henrik Ibsen.
5. Critics.
6. After the Fall, a thinly veiled portrait of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe.