"If Arthur Miller had written nothing more than 'Death of a Salesman, ' " critic Martin Gottfried wrote in his 2003 biography of the playwright, "it would have been enough to establish him among the giants of dramatic literature." He did much more than that.

Arthur Miller died Thursday night at his home in Roxbury, Conn., of congestive heart failure at the age of 89. For decades the nation's pre- eminent playwright, Miller not only defined the destructive side of the American dream in "Salesman" and other works, he embodied the dream's promise as the son of an immigrant who achieved enormous success. He also, in the person of his second wife -- international sex icon Marilyn Monroe -- could be said to have married that dream.

In a career that spanned more than half a century, Arthur Miller wrote 25 plays -- many almost as highly regarded as "Salesman" -- as well as screenplays, essays, stories, novels and an autobiography, "Timebends." He received every major award in his field, including three Tony Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, an Emmy Award and a John F. Kennedy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1984. By the end of his life, he had achieved the iconic stature of one whose name lends dignity to the award given.

He also devoted himself tirelessly to human rights causes, becoming, in the eyes of many, the moral conscience of the nation for standing up against McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee. He confounded many who had applauded his stand by continuing to work with actors and others, notably the director Elia Kazan, who had famously cooperated with the committee by naming names. He was, he explained, opposed to blacklisting of all kinds.

As the first international president of the professional writers association PEN, he championed the freedom of dissident writers in Soviet-bloc countries and throughout the world. He campaigned for progressive causes and against all forms of censorship throughout his life and was outspoken in his criticisms of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and of what he considered the Bush administration's abridgements of civil liberties.

In his life and writings, Miller was representative of his times -- the bulk of the 20th century. Born Oct. 17, 1915, in Manhattan, Arthur Asher Miller was the second son of an illiterate but very successful clothing manufacturer, Isidore Miller, an Eastern European Jewish immigrant, and his wife, Augusta (called Gussie), the New York-born daughter of German Jewish immigrants.

A prosperous childhood, during which he showed more of an inclination for sports than school, came to a dramatic close with the stock market crash of 1929. As Isidore Miller struggled to save his company, the family moved from its spacious uptown Manhattan apartment to a cramped, flimsy house in the outlying Gravesend section of Brooklyn -- a home not unlike that of the Loman family in "Salesman" (the character of Willy Loman was partly based on one of Arthur Miller's uncles).

"The presumption of a permanent prosperity exploded in a matter of weeks, " Miller wrote in "Timebends." "A month ago you were riding around in a limousine, now you were scraping to pay the rent."

The stock market crash and its aftermath had a major impact on Miller's life and work, not only in fixing his attention on social and economic justice and the hollow promise of the American dream as major themes. His much-admired older brother, Kermit, who had shown more promise as an athlete and a student, quit college to help their father try to save the family business. Arthur, through hard work at a variety of jobs and creative writing on his application letter, managed to go to the University of Michigan.

Financial need influenced his turn toward theater. Miller entered a playwriting contest administered by the university, winning a $250 prize that enabled him to attend for a second year. He won the Avery Hopwood Award again the next year as well as a $1,200 award from New York's Theater Guild. Though most of his next six plays were rejected, and his first Broadway production --

"The Man Who Had All the Luck" in 1944 -- was an instant failure (closing after four performances), he decided to make one last attempt at a life in the theater. "All My Sons," produced in '47, enjoyed a substantial run and started his career.

At the time, Miller was working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard to support his family. In 1940, he had married Mary Grace Slattery, with whom he had two children. The marriage ended in divorce in 1955, in large part because of Miller's affair with Monroe, whom he married the next year. By then, he was the famous author of "Salesman" ('49) and "The Crucible" ('53). She, recently divorced from baseball legend Joe DiMaggio, was Hollywood's leading sex symbol.

The marriage has been widely interpreted -- at the time and increasingly ever since -- as a union between American icons representing everything from high and popular culture to the mind and the body, tragedy and comedy and intellect and sex. It also coincided with Miller's opposition to the anti-communist witch hunts of the '50s, his refusal to name names before HUAC and his citation for contempt of Congress.

The marriage with Monroe ended in 1961, the year the movie "The Misfits," which he had written for her, premiered. The following year, Miller married Austrian photographer Inge Morath, with whom he had a daughter, filmmaker Rebecca Miller. Morath, with whom he also wrote several books, died in 2002.

Both marriages were reflected in "After the Fall," Miller's most nakedly autobiographical drama. The play also chronicles his stand against McCarthyism and his split with Kazan, who had staged Miller's initial successes "All My Sons" and "Salesman" -- and would also direct the controversial premiere of "Fall" in '64. Miller, who professed to be puzzled by criticisms that he had exploited Monroe's memory, staunchly denied that the play chronicled their marriage. He returned to the subject in his final play, "Finishing the Picture, " which opened last fall in Chicago -- about the making of a movie under circumstances very similar to those that plagued "Misfits."

Though Miller never considered himself an autobiographical playwright, the major themes of his plays clearly derive from his life. The Depression, which he compared to the Civil War as a turning point in American history, haunts his work from "Salesman" on through his epic "The American Clock" in 1980.

His sibling rivalry with his brother Kermit and his conflicted feelings about pursuing his own career while Kermit sacrificed his prospects to help the family are expressed in the relationship between brothers in "Salesman," "Sons" and "Price," among others. His guilt about his affair with Monroe crops up in "The Crucible," and that play -- and his adaptation of Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People" -- are defiant reactions against McCarthyism.

With "Fall," Miller began exploring his Jewishness more explicitly, a theme that recurs in many of his later works, including "The Price," "Incident at Vichy" ('65), "The Creation of the World and Other Business" ('72) and the Emmy Award-winning "Playing for Time" ('80). Themes of personal responsibility, political repression and individual integrity continued to hold center stage through the seemingly indefatigable Miller's later plays -- "The Ride Down Mt. Morgan" ('91), "Broken Glass" ('94), "Mr. Peter's Connections" ('98) and the satirical "Resurrection Blues" ('02).

Few of his later plays met with critical or popular favor. After his success with "Sons" and "Salesman," Miller was attacked by conservative writers for his politics in the '50s and abandoned by most of the critical establishment after "Fall." As with most major American writers, high regard gave way to a period of critical neglect and hostility, which -- in Miller's case -- roughly coincided with the same arc in the career of his contemporary,Tennessee Williams.

Unlike Williams, who died during his critical eclipse, Miller lived long enough to reap the rewards of rediscovery. Even during the '70s and '80s, when he was almost invisible on Broadway, "Salesman," "Crucible" and "Sons" in particular continued to hold their own on regional stages throughout America and abroad. Even as American producers turned their backs on his new plays, they received major productions and attention in London. Starting in the '90s, Broadway began rediscovering Miller with highly regarded revivals of "Salesman, " "A View From the Bridge," "Price" and "Crucible."

Throughout their lives, Miller and Williams often were set up as rivals for the title of greatest American playwright. Williams was characterized as the more poetic, dreamy and, in his latter years, daringly experimental artist; Miller as the rigid moralist and social realist. The contrast isn't fair to either writer, each in his way a legitimate artistic heir to Eugene O'Neill, the giant of American drama in the first half of the 20th century.

A gritty realism pervades the poetry of much of Williams' best work, as does a social conscience and a moral sense as fierce as Miller's. Both men approached mainstream culture with the consciousness of outsiders, and Miller's Jewish identity is almost as cloaked in his early works as Williams' homosexuality is in his.

Miller also experimented with form throughout his career. The structure of "Salesman" -- with dream and memory sequences intruding on the present - - confounded and excited audiences in 1949. If the play no longer seems experimental, that's only a measure of the pervasive influence "Salesman" and its author have had on the American theater.