Arthur Miller was born to moderately affluent Jewish-American parents, Isidore and Augusta Miller,[3] in Harlem, New York City, in 1915. His father owned a women’s clothes/coat-manufacturing business, which failed in the Wall Street Crash of 1929[4] after which his family moved to humbler quarters in Brooklyn.[5]

Because of the effects of the Great Depression on his family, Miller had no money for college after graduating in 1932 from Abraham Lincoln High School (New York).[5] After securing a place at the University of Michigan, he worked in a number of menial jobs to pay for his tuition.

At the University of Michigan, Miller first majored in journalism, where he became the reporter and night editor on the student paper, the Michigan Daily. It was during this time that he wrote his first work, No Villain.[6] After winning the Avery Hopwood Award for No Villain, Miller switched his major to English, where he met Professor Kenneth Rowe, who aided Miller in his early forays into playwrighting.[7] Miller retained strong ties to his alma mater throughout the rest of his life, establishing the university’s Arthur Miller Award in 1985 and Arthur Miller Award for Dramatic Writing in 1999, and lending his name to the Arthur Miller Theatre in 2000.[8] In 1937, Miller wrote Honors at Dawn, which also received the Avery Hopwood Award.[6]

In 1938, Miller received his bachelor’s degree in English. After graduation, he joined the Federal Theater Project, a New Deal agency established to provide jobs in the theater. He chose the theater project although he had an offer to work as a scriptwriter for 20th Century Fox.[6] However, Congress, worried about possible Communist infiltration, closed the project.[5] Miller began working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard while continuing to write radio plays, some of which were broadcast on CBS.[5][6]

On August 5, 1940, he married his college sweetheart, Mary Slattery, the Catholic daughter of an insurance salesman.[9] The couple had two children, Jane and Robert. Robert became a director, writer and producer whose was, among other things, producer of the 1996 movie version of The Crucible[10].

Miller was exempted from military service during World War II because of a high-school football injury to his left kneec