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SLATTERY Mary Grace

Date of birth : June 4, 1915, Ohio.

Date of death : December 12, 2008, California.

 
Liberal Catholic, native to Lakeview, Ohio.

First wife of Arthur Miller.

They met in 1936, at the University of Michigan.

Student in first year, she specialized in psychology, planning to become a social worker, so that her commitment and her socialist political convictions come true. Arthur and Mary soon realized that they shared the same opinion on almost everything, including religion (she had moved away from Catholicism like Arthur from Judaism).

With Norman Rosten, Miller's friend and student at the University of Michigan, they formed a group of 3 friends, until Mary introduced to them her room-mate, Hedda Rowinski, who also studied psychology.
She became Norman's girlfriend and later became his wife. Thus, the Rostens became Arthur's oldest friends.
 

In 1937-1938 she found a job as a secretary in a publishing company, Harcourt Brace.

Then she worked as a secretary at Reynal and Hitchcock publisher, in New York City, where she was Frank Taylor's secretary, who would later become Arthur Miller's publisher and producer of "The Misfits".

It's thought that Mary's father experience, an insurance salesman, was used by Miller to write "Death of a Salesman".

They married on August 5, 1940 (), and would remain for 15 years, until their divorce on June 11, 1956. 

;,-

They had 2 children, Jane (1944) and Robert (1947).

 

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