Arthur MillerDeath of a Salesman
Arthur Miller is one of the leading American playwrights of the ______century. He was born in October of 1915 in ______, the son of a ladies-wear manufacturer who was ruined during the economic collapse of the 1930s. As a young man during the ______, Miller was shaped by the poverty that surrounded him, which demonstrated to him the insecurity of modern existence. After graduation from high school he worked in a warehouse so that he could earn enough money to attend ______, where he began to write plays.
Miller's first public success was Focus (1945), a novel about anti-Semitism, but it was with ______two years later that Miller emerged as an important playwright. All My Sons is a drama about a manufacturer of faulty war materials. It was with ______in 1949 that Miller secured his reputation as one of the nation's foremost playwrights. Death of a Salesman mixes the tradition of social realism that is a theme of Miller's work with a more experimental structure that includes leaps in ______and ______as the protagonist, ______, drifts into memories of his sons as teenagers. Loman stands as an American archetype, a victim of his own delusions of grandeur and obsession with ______that haunts him in his failure. Miller won a Tony Award and a ______for Death of a Salesman. The play has been frequently revived in film, television, and stage productions.
Miller followed Death of a Salesman with his most politically significant work, ______(1953), a tale of the ______that contains obvious analogies to the McCarthy ______hearings of Miller's contemporary society. Three years later, in 1956, Miller found himself part of these hearings when he was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Miller refused to name people he allegedly saw at a Communist writers' meeting a decade before and was convicted of ______. However, he appealed this verdict and later won. That same year Miller married actress ______. The two divorced in 1961, the year of her death. That year Monroe appeared in her last film, The Misfits, which is based on an original screenplay by Miller. After divorcing Monroe, Miller wed Ingeborg Morath, to whom he stayed married until his death in ______. The two had a son and a daughter.
August Wilson & Fences
PowerPoint Notes
August Wilson was born in ______to a ______father and ______mother.
Wilson dropped out of school in ______grade.
His education came from ______and ______.
He began his career as a writer in Pittsburgh and moved to ______to continue.
In 1968, Wilson returned to Pittsburgh to found the Black Horizon Theatre Company in Pittsburgh’s neighborhood referred to as ______.
______was the first in his series known as the Pittsburgh Cycle.
Wilson died in 2005 in ______of liver cancer.
Two of Wilson’s plays earned Pulitzer prizes, ______and ______.