Birthday of Arthur Miller -- American Playwright

from Writer's Almanac (Garrison Keillor, Minnesota Public Radio):

October 17 is the birthday of playwright Arthur Miller, born in New York City in 1915. His most famous play is Death of a Salesman (1949), about struggling salesman Willy Loman, who was loosely based on Miller's uncle, Manny Newman. He also wrote The Crucible (1952), which is a liberally fictionalized account of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. It's also a thinly veiled indictment of McCarthyism and its communist "witch hunts." Four years later, Miller was hauled up before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was found in contempt of Congress for refusing to offer up any names of suspected communists. "Poetry may seem an odd word for a witch-hunt," he wrote in 2000, "but I saw there was something of the marvellous in the spectacle of a whole village, if not an entire province, whose imagination was captured by a vision of something that wasn't there. [...] More than a political metaphor, more than a moral tale, The Crucible, as it developed over more than a year, became the awesome evidence of the power of human imagination inflamed, the poetry of suggestion, and the tragedy of heroic resistance to a society possessed to the point of ruin."
He died Feb. 10, 2005 in Roxbury, Connecticut.