The Life & Plays of Arthur Miller
Like the plays of George Bernard Shaw, those of Arthur Miller can as easily be read as literature as watched in live performance, and for many of us, for most of the time, the opportunity to read plays is all we have; and what a satisfying experience it is, especially if Arthur Miller is the craftsman.
For Miller it was the 1930s, and the Great Depression, that was the real crucible in which his future work was mixed and honed, which he acknowledges in his 1987 autobiography, Timebends: A Life when he writes that he “… knew the Depression was… a moral catastrophe, a violent revelation of the hypocrisies behind the facade of American society.”
As a consequence of this, Miller went on to write plays that peel away those hypocrisies, and in Death of a Salesman he succeeds brilliantly in creating a character, Willy Loman, who still believes (even as he is taking his own life) in the American Dream, and cannot, will not, acknowledge it has become for him, and many like him, a nightmare.
For Miller the Great Depression was just one of “…two American disasters that were truly national. Not the First or Second World Wars, Vietnam, or even the Revolution. Only the Civil War and the Great Depression touched nearly everyone wherever they lived and whatever their social class.” And it is the dreadful legacy of that 1930s financial upheaval that is at the heart of all of Miller’s plays. If you…
