Three years after The Crucible, in 1956, Miller found himself persecuted by the very force that he warned against, when he was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
In later years, however, it has become one of the most studied and performed plays of American theater. The highly controversial nature of the politics of The Crucible, which lauds those who refuse to name names, led to the play's mixed response. Miller followed Death of a Salesman with his most politically significant work, The Crucible (1953), a tale of the Salem witch trials that contains obvious analogies to the McCarthy anti-Communist hearings in 1950s America. Scott and, most recently, Brian Dennehy in the part of Willy Loman. The play has been frequently revived in film, television, and stage versions that have included actors such as Dustin Hoffman, George C. Miller won a Tony Award for Death of a Salesman as well as a Pulitzer Prize. Loman represents an American archetype: a victim of his own delusions of grandeur and obsession with success, and haunted by a sense of failure. In this play, Miller mixes the tradition of social realism that informs most of his work with a more experimental structure that includes fluid leaps in time as the protagonist, Willy Loman, drifts into memories of his sons as teenagers. The drama of the family is at the core of all of Miller's major plays, but nowhere is it more prominent than in All My Sons and Death of a Salesman.ĭeath of a Salesman (1949) secured Miller's reputation as one of the nation's foremost playwrights. Along with Death of a Salesman (his most enduring success), All My Sons and The Man Who Had All the Luck form a thematic trilogy of plays about love triangles involving fathers and sons.
All My Sons, a drama about a manufacturer of faulty war materials, was strongly influenced by the naturalist drama of Henrik Ibsen. Three years later, All My Sons won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award as the best play of 1947, launching Miller into theatrical stardom. This early setback almost discouraged Miller from writing completely, but he gave himself one more try. Miller's first play to make it to Broadway, The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), was a dismal failure, closing after only four performances. After graduating from high school, Miller worked in a warehouse so that he could earn enough money to attend the University of Michigan, where he began to write plays. The Depression demonstrated to the playwright the fragility and vulnerability of human existence in the modern era. Living through young adulthood during the Great Depression, Miller was shaped by the poverty that surrounded him. He was born in October 1915 in New York City to a women's clothing manufacturer, who lost everything in the economic collapse of the 1930s. Arthur Miller was one of the leading American playwrights of the twentieth century.
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