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Enoch Brater Early Days, Early Works Arthur Miller at the University of Michigan I Arthur Miller’s long association with the University of Michigan actually began with a rejection letter—two of them, in point of fact.When he graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, NewYork, in 1933, he needed four faculty members to write letters of recommendation; he could find only three. He had flunked algebra three times, and the rest of his record—both at Lincoln and at James Madison High School, where he spent two years playing football (a serious leg injury later kept him out of military service)—was similarly lackluster, and that is putting a good face on it. Turned down in 1933, he applied again in 1934 because, as he told me informally in October 2000, Michigan was one of the few places that took writing seriously .1 When he received a disappointing second letter of rejection, he was emboldened to respond to the dean of the college, telling him that he had been working hard and “had turned into a much more serious fellow.”Years later, writing for Holiday magazine in 1953, Miller remembered that the dean said he “would give me a try, but I had better make some grades. I could not conceive of a dean at Columbia or Harvard doing that.”2 Looking back at this probationary period from his eighty- fifth year, Miller commented,“I still can’t believe Michigan let me in.”3 What brought a NewYorker like Arthur Miller to a Midwestern college town like Ann Arbor? First and foremost, tuition was cheap; and these were, after all, some of the toughest years of the Depression.Tuition was free, of course, at a more likely choice for someone from Miller’s background: City College, now part of the City University of NewYork. This had long been the intellectual center for boys and girls born to immigrant parents like Miller’s, Polish Jews who made whatever fortune they had at the schmata trade in Manhattan’s Garment District on Seventh Avenue. Isidore Miller, the playwright’s father, actually owned and ran a coat factory there, but what had once been a thriving manufacturing business went belly-up after the crash of ’29.“I did go to City College for about three weeks in the evening,” Miller said,“because I was working during the daytime.But I couldn’t stay awake.”4 After a few weeks, he dropped out. Miller’s father, a practical-minded businessman, was amazed to hear of a faraway school called Michigan that would actually pay students money for writing. His son told him about the prestigious Avery Hopwood Awards, built from a legacy given by another Michigan alumnus who had made a fortune on Broadway with such slight bedroom farces as Getting Gertie’s Garter and Up in Mabel’s Room; plays like The Best People (revived in a Michigan student production in February 1998, directed by Philip Kerr) brought in huge box office receipts in the 1920s. Miller’s father was impressed, but he reminded his son that he had to make some money first—before trying his hand at the Hopwoods. Miller worked in NewYork for two years at Chadwick-Delamater, a gigantic warehouse for automobile parts located on the site that was later to become, in 1963, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. He made fifteen dollars a week and worked for a “very dour, pasty-faced, very neat” boss named Wesley Moulton.“The area was a kind of slum,” he wrote in the NewYork magazine (December 18–25, 2000),“with a lot of saloons, working-class bars, and boarded-up houses.”They had never hired someone who was Jewish before, and at first wouldn’t hire Miller when he answered their ad in a newspaper. But his old boss in Brooklyn intervened and told Moulton in no uncertain terms that Miller knew “more about parts than most of you guys, so if you don’t give him a job there’s only one reason.”At Chadwick-Delamater Miller remembered that he “was the only Jew.The guy who worked there after me was an Italian.They hated him, too.”5 In the years before superhighways,and even before the landmark Pennsylvania Turnpike was constructed, it took a long time to get from New York to southeastern Michigan. But once he arrived in Ann Arbor after a circuitous bus ride and a hitchhike, he...

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