No enemy of the people

During that span Monroe starred as Sugar Kane Kowalczyk in “Some Like It Hot’’ (1959), a huge hit costarring Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon and directed by Billy Wilder; but the marriage ended badly soon after she made a much less successful film written for her by Miller, aptly titled “The Misfits’’ - a thinly veiled story about a couple rather like themselves but also reflecting the tensions in Miller’s first marriage, which ended after he met Monroe in Hollywood, but not because of her.

Born in 1915 to an immigrant Jewish family in New York that became quite affluent in the garment industry, Miller suffered from the deprivations of humbling family losses during the Great Depression that damaged relations between his semiliterate father and his bright, cultured mother. He also endured the strains of having an older brother who sacrificed education to work for the family’s survival while Miller managed to scrape together enough to attend the University of Michigan and write prize-winning plays. Whereas the brother served in World War II, Miller was designated 4-F because of a leg injury.

Understandably, his plays concern guilt, tensions between fathers and sons and between brothers, unhappy marriages, persecution, issues of immigrant life, social class, and infidelity, but also redemption from personal transgression. Miller believed that he could only write from experience and drew heavily upon people and places he had known well, including his blue-collar factory work during the war.

The plays are also intensely political, sometimes implicitly but often overtly in the case of “All My Sons’’ (war-time profiteering from inferior equipment) and “The Crucible’’ (witch hunting in 17th-century Salem) because they were written during the first phase of the Cold War, a time of virulent anticommunism and dreams of making good in the struggle for economic survival.