(Page 3 of 6) Within two years of graduating, Mr. Miller had written six plays, every one of them rejected by producers except "The Man Who Had All the Luck." When it lasted only four performances on Broadway in 1944, he added two or three more works to the reject pile and wrote "Focus," a novel about anti-Semitism. In 1940 he had married his college sweetheart, Mary Grace Slattery, with whom he soon had two children. To support his family he worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, wrote scripts for radio and took a final shot at playwriting. "I laid myself a wager," he wrote in his autobiography. "I would hold back this play until I was as sure as I could be that every page was integral to the whole and would work; then, if my judgment of it proved wrong, I would leave the theater behind and write in other forms." That play was "All My Sons," which Brooks Atkinson, the Times drama critic, called "an honest, forceful drama about a group of people caught up in a monstrous swindle that has caused the death of 21 Army pilots because of defectively manufactured cylinder heads." It was selected as one of the 10 best plays of 1947, won two Tony Awards and took the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. (Eugene O'Neill's "Iceman Cometh" was the runner-up.) "All My Sons" enjoyed a revival and new relevance when it was shown on public television in 1987, a year after the Challenger space shuttle exploded because of defective seals in the joints of its booster rocket. 'Attention Must Be Paid' In 1949 Willy Loman, riding on "a smile and a shoeshine" and determined to be not just liked but well liked, made his way into American consciousness in "Death of a Salesman." Mr. Miller wrote the play in six weeks, and for the first time in Broadway history, a play made a clean sweep of the top three awards. Acclaimed as a modern American masterpiece in its first reviews, translated into 29 languages and performed even in Beijing, "Salesman" was no sooner a major success of the Broadway stage than it was savaged in intellectual journals as sentimentality, melodrama or Marxist propaganda. Sentimental or not, "Death of a Salesman" stunned audiences. Atkinson called it "a rare event in the theater," and "a suburban epic that may not be intended as poetry but becomes poetry in spite of itself." Lines from the play became hallmarks of the postwar era. "You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away," Willy bellowed, coming to grips with the fact that he was no longer the hotshot salesman he once was and finding himself pleading with his young boss to keep his job, saying, "A man is not a piece of fruit." More eloquently, Willy's careworn wife spoke for the inherent dignity of her husband's life, providing a stirring refutation of the cruelties of America's capitalist culture: "Attention must be paid." In 1950, Mr. Miller wrote an adaptation of Ibsen's drama "An Enemy of the People." This 19th-century play, whose hero resisted pressure to conform to the ideology of the day, resonated in the McCarthyite climate of the mid-20th century. Mr. Miller was encouraged to undertake the work by one of the foremost acting couples of that generation, Fredric March and his wife, Florence Eldridge, who had agreed to play the leading roles. "An Enemy of the People," in philosophy at least, served as a forerunner of "The Crucible," a dramatization of the Salem witch hunt of the 17th century that implicitly articulated Mr. Miller's outrage at McCarthyism. In his autobiography he recalled that at one performance of "The Crucible," upon the execution of the leading character, John Proctor, people "stood up and remained silent for a couple of minutes, with heads bowed" because "the Rosenbergs were at that moment being electrocuted in Sing Sing." "The Crucible" was also the occasion of Mr. Miller's explosive rift with Kazan, the director of his greatest successes. Kazan's decision to name names at a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing incensed Mr. Miller, and the play was seen by some as a personal rebuke. Bypassing Kazan for the project, Mr. Miller and his producer, Kermit Bloomgarden, turned to Jed Harris, a domineering director whose career had faltered after a string of successes in the 1920's. But Mr. Harris's production was not well received, with Atkinson criticizing his direction as "overwrought." Five months after the opening, with the box office lagging, Mr. Miller restaged the play himself, inserting a scene that had been cut. The revised version was better received, but the run was still unsuccessful. A Bellwether of Freedom -- Esc_ --

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