Arthur Miller

He was caught in his own dramas, including a doomed and stormy marriage to sex symbol Marilyn Monroe.

Arthur Miller, who died on Friday at age 89, wrote plays as powerful as Greek tragedy and was caught in dramas of his own, including a doomed and stormy marriage to sex symbol Marilyn Monroe.

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He won a Pulitzer prize and international fame with his 1949 play Death of a Salesman, which created the memorable character of failed businessman Willy Loman and has been performed around the world. Many critics and fans saw him as a Nobel Prize contender but he never won that award.

The left-wing Miller did almost win a jail term for "un-American activities" for refusing to name names before a congressional committee during Sen. Joseph McCarthy's hunt for Communist sympathizers after World War Two.

A June 2003 file photo shows American playwright Arthur Miller (R) and Austrian film producer Regina Strassegger (L) sign photo books of images by Miller's late wife famed photographer Inge Morath at the Leica Gallery in New York. Miller died at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut on February 10, 2005 of heart failure.

In play after play, Miller became a conscience for the nation, bringing ignored social issues to the fore.

His plays included All My Sons, about a war profiteer whose actions destroy his family, and The Crucible, ostensibly about the Salem witch trials of the 17th century but really about the witch hunts of the McCarthy era.

Miller described himself as a stranger in American theater, bringing it unwanted news of the outside world.

In his 1987 autobiography, "Timebends" he wrote vividly and painfully of his 1956 to 1961 marriage to Monroe, describing her as a woman haunted by ghosts of an unhappy childhood that eventually destroyed her.

He described himself as a hapless onlooker, unable to save her or in the end endure her rages against him. She was, he said, the saddest woman he had ever met. His account of their marriage was as powerful as any drama he penned.

In "Timebends" Miller barely mentioned his first wife, Mary Slattery, whom he left to marry Monroe, although in interviews he described that marriage as long dead before he took up with the Hollywood screen goddess.

A child of the Depression, Miller worked his way through college and when he finally reached Broadway he was a committed left-winger. But the Communist Party found little to praise in his work.

His political views, which changed dramatically over the years, drew the attention of the State Department, which confiscated his passport, and the House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee.

He refused demands that he name fellow left-wingers and chose not to invoke the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. Congress voted to hold him in contempt, a verdict later reversed in the courts on technical grounds.

Years later, Miller as president of the international writers group PEN, fought for the rights of writers in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, saying that his experiences in America made him understand harassment.

He told Reuters in a November 1987 interview that the reason he was hauled before Congress was his impending marriage to Monroe and said that the committee chairman, Francis Walters, was ready to call off the whole thing in exchange for having Monroe pose for a photograph with him. Miller refused.