Centennial of playwright and former Brooklynite Arthur Miller
An inferior and uninterested student while attending high school in Brooklyn, Arthur Miller would become one of the 20th century’s most prominent playwrights. This Oct. 17 marks the 100th anniversary of his birth.
Arthur Asher Miller was born in Harlem to parents who were of Jewish heritage. His father, Isadore, had sailed to America by himself at age six with a cardboard sign hung around his neck that said “Please put this boy on the SS Clearwater.”
From this hardscrabble predicament, Miller’s father had managed to become a successful businessman, owning the Miltex Coat and Suit Company, which had more than 800 employees, according to Martin Gottfried’s biography “Arthur Miller: His Life and Work.”
The Millers lived on the sixth floor of a tony building on 110th Street, at the north end of Central Park. During this time, their summers were spent at a house on Rockaway Beach. But Arthur Miller’s cushy upbringing, along with so many others, went crumbling to bits in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street stock market crash.