Here's Who Inherited Arthur Miller's Money After His Death
In his final weeks of life, author Arthur Miller moved into his sister's Manhattan apartment (via the Chicago Tribune). The famous 89-year-old author and playwright had been having numerous health issues, starting with heart problems, compounded by pneumonia, then bladder cancer, and finally, bone cancer. He died on February 10, 2005, of congestive heart failure, per The New York Times. He was an avid writer with a compelling storytelling style, and even after his death, the saga of Miller's family life and inheritance gave the public a fresh look at a complex figure.
Arthur Miller is considered to be among the greatest authors and playwrights ever: He penned timeless classics like "Death of a Salesman," "All My Sons," and "The Crucible" (via Britannica). He later wrote the scripts for these movies, according to Celebrity Net Worth. He was a Pulitzer Prize winner who was married three times — including a brief but infamous marriage to actress Marilyn Monroe.
His three marriages
Arthur Miller's first wife was Mary Slattery, who he had two children with — Jane Ellen and Robert (per Biography). After their 1956 divorce, Miller dated actress Marilyn Monroe for five years, but they didn't have any children together. Then, in his third marriage to photographer Inge Morath in 1962, he had two more kids, Rebecca and Daniel. So Arthur Miller had four children in total: Jane Doyle, Robert Miller, Daniel Miller, and Rebecca Miller (via Vanity Fair). But there was a sad reason that he almost never publicly recognized Daniel, instead letting the press claim he had three children.
Arthur Miller hid the existence of his son for much of his life, per NPR. His son Daniel, who has Down's syndrome, was sent to live at the Southbury Training School in Connecticut. Even when the child was an infant, Miller didn't visit Daniel, Vanity Fair reports. Daniel's mother, Morath, usually visited him once per week, but the conditions of the facilities were reportedly horrible. Today, Daniel is now in his 50s and living with a foster family.
He left nearly everything to his kids
Even though Daniel was cut off from his biological family during much of his life, he did still get an equal portion of his father's estate (per NPR). That's because out of the blue, about six weeks before Arthur Miller died, he added Daniel into a trust, making him an equal heir to his other three children, according to Vanity Fair.
According to a letter from Rebecca Miller (per Vanity Fair), he bequeathed "everything left over after taxes" to his children. In his will, Miller specified that Daniel was to be treated as equal to his siblings while his estate was being distributed. It was a surprising move, and not even an entirely helpful one to Daniel, who suddenly found himself too wealthy to continue receiving crucial government support. After all, Miller's notoriety as a writer left him with a $10 million net worth to disperse among his family (via Celebrity Net Worth).
As for his vast collection of writing, after Miller's death, some of his valuable manuscripts lay around collecting dust at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, according to The New York Times. In life, Miller had sent his writing there for safekeeping. The Hartford-Courant reports that he was hoping for a tax break in the aftermath of his divorce from Monroe.
Miller left behind thousands of pages of writing
The huge cache of writing at the Ransom Center is considered quite valuable since it contains poems, essays, speeches, and even full novels that were never published (via The New York Times). But students and faculty couldn't browse through his writings because the 160 boxes of papers weren't cataloged. Another enormous stack of 8,000 pages of his personal journals remained at his house until the University of Texas purchased the entirety of his archives for $2.7 million, outbidding Yale University. Some of his other written works fetched high prices — a love letter he wrote to Marilyn Monroe sold for $43,750. Today, the Harry Ransom Center has doubled the size of its Arthur Miller archives for a total of 366 boxes of general writing and 19 boxes of restricted materials.
Now that it's been 17 years since his death, Arthur Miller's estate is still handling his writing today (per The Guardian). Filmmaker and writer Rebecca Miller is Arthur's daughter, and she has played a big role in determining how her father's works can be used after his death. According to The News-Times, Rebecca donated 155 acres of her father's estate to create the Arthur Miller and Inge Morath Miller Preserve.