Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Arthur Miller, who died on 10 February, 2005, was one of the most influential figures in American literature.

He wrote classic plays such as Death of a Salesman, A View from the Bridge and The Crucible , which are performed and studied the world over.

He was also known for being hauled in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the communist crackdowns of the 1950s and for his marriage to Marilyn Monroe .

Arthur Asher Miller was born in New York to Isidore and Augusta Miller on 17 October, 1915. His father’s successful ladies wear firm was ruined by the great depression in 1929, plunging the family into poverty. They moved into a small house in Brooklyn and this period in the teenage Arthur’s life had a huge impact on his writing.

He played sports and read adventure stories as a boy, showing little signs of his literary future. It wasn’t until he read the Dostoevsky novel The Brothers Karamazov that he decided to be a writer. He took a job in a car parts warehouse to fund his entry to the University of Michigan to studied journalism in 1934.

While at university he won two Avery Hopwood Awards for playwriting and switched his major to English. After graduating in 1938 he turned down an offer from 20th Century Fox to join the Federal Theatre Project and wrote radio plays for CBS.

A sporting injury made him exempt from military service, allowing him to continue writing. In 1944 his first Broadway play, The Man Who Had All The Luck (written in 1940), ran for only six shows but scooped the Theatre Guild’s National Award. The following year his first novel, Focus , was published to a lukewarm response.

After a couple of difficult years, All My Sons (1947) opened at New York’s Coronet Theatre and received two Tony Awards. Two years later and Death of a Salesman , his most famous play, opened for the first of more than 700 performances. It earned Mr Miller another Tony and the coveted Pulitzer Prize for drama.

His next original production was The Crucible (1953) which drew parallels between the Salem witch-hunts of the 1600s and the contemporary anti-Communist measures being taken by the government, inspired by the experience of director and friend Elia Kazan when he was questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

Shortly after The Crucible, Mr Miller found himself as the focus of the HUAC. Called in for questioning, he admitted to attending meetings of communist organisations but denied he was a communist himself. He was fined $500, sentenced to 30 days in prison and has his passport confiscated for refusing to give the committee names of communist friends, though the conviction was later over-turned by the court of appeal.

In 1956 his 16-year marriage to college sweetheart Mary Slattery ended and he became the envy of millions of men around the world when he married Marilyn Monroe with whom he’d been having an affair. The marriage would last five years until they divorced a year before Monroe’s death in 1962. He based his 1964 play After the Fall on his experiences married to Ms Monroe.

In 1969, though suspected of being a communist in his own country, his works were banned in the Soviet Union because of his campaign for free speech for dissident writers. However, several years later he was allowed to direct a production of Death of a Salesman in communist China.

In the 1970s his plays became more experimental and several of them were commercial failures. Over the next few decades his output was sporadic, though he was involved in several screen adaptations of his earlier works. He wrote his autobiography, Timebends, in 1987, revealing many details of his marriage to Monroe which he had previously refused to talk about.

His third wife, photographer Inge Morath, who he married in 1962 and had two children with, died in 2002. Mr Miller had been living with 34-year-old artist Agnes Barley at his Connecticut farm in the years before his death from a heart failure at the age of 89. His last play, Finishing the Picture , had been debuted a few months earlier.