Timeline of Arthur Miller’s life up to “Death of a Salesman.” From http://www.ibiblio.org/miller/life.html
1915 Arthur Aster Miller was born on October 17th in New York City; family lives at 45 West 110th Street.
1920-28 Attends Public School #24 in Harlem.
1923 Sees first play–a melodrama at the Schubert Theater.
1928 Bar-mitzvah at the Avenue M temple. Father’s business struggling and family move to Brooklyn, 1350 East 3rd Street. Attends James Madison HIgh School.
1930 Reassigned to the newly built Abraham Lincoln High School. Plays on football team.
1931 Delivery boy for local bakery before school, and works for father’s business over summer vacation.
1933 Graduates from Abraham Lincoln High School. Registers for night school at City College, but quits after two weeks.
1933-34 Clerked in an auto-parts warehouse, where he was the only Jew employed and had his first real, personal experiences of American anti-semitism.
1934 Enters University of Michigan in the Fall to study journalism. Reporter and night editor on student paper, The Michigan Daily.
1936 Writes No Villain in six days and receives Hopwood Award in Drama. Transfers to an English major.
1937 Takes playwrighting class with Professor Kenneth T. Rowe. Rewrite of No Villain, titled, They Too Arise, receives a major award from the Bureau of New Plays and is produced in Ann Arbor and Detroit. Honors at Dawn receives Hopwood Award in Drama. Drives Ralph Neaphus East to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain during their Civil War, and decides not to go with him.
1938 The Great Disobedience receives second place in the Hopwood contest. They Too Arise is revised and titled The Grass Still Grows for anticipated production in New York City (never materializes). Graduates with a B.A. in English. Joins the Federal Theater Project in New York City to write radio plays and scripts, having turned down a much better paying offer to work as a scriptwriter for Twentieth Century Fox, in Hollywood.
1939 Writes Listen My Children, and You’re Next with Norman Rosten. Federal Theater is shut down and has to go on relief. William Ireland’s Confession airs on Colimbia Workshop.
1940 Travels to North Carolina to collect dialect speech for the folk division of the Library of Congress. Marries Mary Grace Slattery. Writes The Golden Years. Meets Clifford Odets in a second-hand bookstore. The Pussycat and the Plumber Who Was a Man, a radio play airs on Columbia Workshop (CBS)
1941 Takes extra job working nightshift as a shipfitter’s helper at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. Writes other radio plays, Joel Chandler Harris, and Captain Paul.
1942 Writes radio plays The Battle of the Ovens, Thunder fron the Mountains, I Was Married in Bataan, Toward a Farther Star, The Eagle’s Nest, and The Four Freedoms.
1943 Writes The Half-Bridge, and one-act, That They May Win, produced in New York City. Writes Listen for the Sound of Wings (radio play).
1944 Daughter, Jane, is born. Writes radio plays Bernadine, I Love You, Grandpa and t he Statue, and The Phillipines Never Surrendered. Adapts Ferenc Molnar’s The Guardsman and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for the radio. Having toured army camps to research for The Story of G.I. Joe (a film for which he wrote the initial draft screenplay, but later withdrew from project when he saw they would not let him write it his way), he publishes book about experience, Situation Normal. The Man Who Had All The Luck premiers on Broadway but closes after six performances (including 2 previews), though receives the Theater Guild National Award.
1945 Focus (novel) published. Writes Listen for the Sound of Wings (radio play). Writes “Should Ezra Pound Be Shot?” for New Masses (article).
1946 Adapts George Abbott’s and John C. Holm’s Three Men on a Horse for radio.
1947 All My Sons premiers and receives the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and the Donaldson Award. Son, Robert, is born. Writes The Story of Gus (radio play). Writes “Subsidized Theatre” for The New York Times (article). Goes to work for a short time in an inner city factory assembling beer boxes for minimum wage to stay in touch with his audience. Gives first interview to John K. Hutchens, for The New York Times. Explores the Red Hook area and tries to get into the world of the longshoremen there, and find out about Pete Panto, whose story would form the nucleus of his screenplay The Hook. Buys farmhouse in Roxbury Connecticut as a vacation home, and 31 Grace Court in the city.
1948 Built himself the small Connecticut studio in which he wrote Death of a Salesman. Trip to Europe with Vinny Longhi where got sense of the Italian background he would use for the Carbones and their relatives, also met some Jewish deathcamp survivors held captive in a post-war tangle of bureaucracy.
1949 Death of a Salesman premiers and receives the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, the Antoinette Perry Award, the Donaldson Award, and the Theater Club Award, among others. New York Times publishes “Tragedy and the Common Man” (essay). Attends the pro-Soviet Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to chair an arts panel with Odets and Dmitri Shostakovich.