He wrote Death of a Salesman in 1948, which won a Tony Award as well as the Pulitzer Prize, and made him a star. His first play, The Man Who Had All the Luck opened in 1944, but Miller had his first real success with All My Sons (1947). He married his college sweetheart, Mary Slattery, in 1940, with whom he had two children. After college, he worked for the government's Federal Theater Project, which was soon closed for fear of possible Communist infiltration. There, he received awards for his playwriting.
Miller was unintellectual as a boy, but decided to become a writer and attended the University of Michigan to study journalism. In the stock crash of 1929, his father's clothing business failed and the family moved to more affordable housing in Brooklyn. Arthur Miller was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Manhattan.