The crucible author

Reading & Creating Texts – Unit 1

By Arthur Miller

By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up a new relationship between a man and men, and between

men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us know more, and not merely to spend our feelings.

Arthur Miller was born in New York on 17 October, 1915. He lived in the northern district of Harlem. At the time, Harlem was a well-off area where most Jewish families lived. Arthur Miller's father, Isidore was a clothing manufacturer and in the 1920s Isidore, Augusta (Miller's mother) and Kermit (Miller's brother) moved to Brooklyn, across the East River from Manhattan. The business was doing well and the Miller family were enjoying a comfortable life until the 1930s when the American economy collapsed. Businesses and farms all over the United States encountered serious problems and for many people the depression brought homelessness and financial ruin. Isidore Miller's business was not spared and the Miller household experienced an immediate transformation, plummeting to an economic demise. This episode in Arthur Miller's life was to have a powerful impact on him and influenced his views on society's values, politics and life in general.

Arthur Miller's world was shattered, for without his father's financial aid there was little hope that he would be able to attend university. Miller was an exceptional student and an equally hard worker. He managed to do odd jobs and save enough money to go to university. In 1934 he enrolled in the University of Michigan and started studying journalism. His first play, ‘They Too Arise’, provided the motivation for his academic move into playwriting. Then he wrote ‘Honors at Dawn’ (1936) and ‘No Villain’ (1937) which merited him the University of Michigan Hopwood Awards.

In 1938 Miller returned to New York and joined the Federal Theatre Project but the project ended abruptly. During this time, Miller wrote radio scripts and two books, ‘Situation Normal’ (1944) and ‘Focus’, a novel about antiSemitism. Miller also married Mary Grace Slattery in 1940. In 1944 he wrote ‘The Man Who Had all the Luck’, but unfortunately the play was not received favourably and Miller became disheartened. He decided, however, to give playwriting one more chance. In 1947 he wrote ‘All My Sons’, a play about an aircraft manufacturer cutting corners on US air force planes during the Second World War. It was a critical and financial success.

VCE ENGLISH UNIT 1&2

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Reading & Creating Texts – Unit 1

By 1947 Miller was doing reasonably well and had established a comfortable life-style for himself and his wife. He owned an apartment in New York and a farmhouse in Connecticut where he found his creative incentive and energy.

In 1949 ‘Death of a Salesman’ came out and Miller was awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. ‘The Crucible’ was first performed in 1953 but it was not a commercial hit. Notably, however, it is his 'most produced play'. ‘The Crucible’ won him a Tony Award. Miller wrote this play during the McCarthy period when many of his friends and colleagues were being accused and attacked for their supposed pro-communist beliefs. Ironically Miller too appeared in front of the HUAC in 1956, and like John Proctor in ‘The Crucible’, he refused to implicate others who were supposedly involved in un-American and pro-communist activities.

While completing his research for The Crucible Miller wrote several years later: In the stillness of the Salem courthouse, surrounded by the images of the 1950s but my head in 1692, what

the two eras had in common gradually gained definition. Both had the menace of concealed plots, but most

startling were the similarities in the rituals of defence, the investigative routines; 300 years apart, both prosecutions alleged membership of a secret, disloyal group. Should the accused confess, his honesty could only

be proved by naming former confederates. The informer became the axle of the plot's existence and the investigation's necessity... Salem village, that pious, devout settlement at the edge of white civilisation, had displayed - three centuries before the Russo-American rivalry and the issues it raised -what can only be called

a built-in pestilence in the human mind; a fatality forever awaiting the right conditions for its always unique, forever unprecedented outbreak of distrust, alarm, suspicion and murder. And for people wherever the

play is performed on any of the five continents, there is always a certain amazement that the same terror that is happening to them or that is threatening them, has happened before to others...

In 1951 he met and fell in love with Marilyn Monroe. The media at the time were happy to depict Miller and Monroe as the 'odd couple'. Miller divorced Slattery, and in 1956 married Monroe. They remained married for five years and during that time Miller wrote ‘The Misfits’, in which Marilyn Monroe appeared. During this period, Miller's writing remained prolific and he continued to focus on writing plays. ‘A View from the Bridge’ (1956) set in Red Hook, Brooklyn, depicted the dreams and the disgrace of Eddie Carbone, a longshoreman. ‘After the Fall’ (1964) had an autobiographical tone which equally won him praise and controversy. Miller increased his political involvement, and in 1965 was elected the president of the literary organisation PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists). The organisation fought for the artistic and creative rights of writers, providing a forum for writers to express their beliefs and concerns freely without fear of recrimination and fight governmental repression. He worked tirelessly for improved relations between communist countries of the East and the capitalist democracies of the West.

After Marilyn Monroe’s death, Arthur Miller married the professional photographer Ingeborg Morath in 1962. Miller continued to write plays, novels, television scripts and his own autobiography entitled ‘Timebends’. In 1996, The Crucible was adapted for film by Miller himself. It successfully earned him an Academy Award for Best Screenplay based on previously produced material. Miller's last play ‘Finishing the Picture’ premiered in 2004. Arthur Miller died of heart failure on 10 February, 2005 at his Roxbury, Connecticut home in the United States.

VCE ENGLISH UNIT 1&2

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