1. Arthur Miller 1915 -- 2005 American Genius

2. Life and Times of Arthur Miller
Miller was born into a German Jewish family in Manhattan on October 17, 1915; his father was a well-to-do but almost illiterate clothing manufacturer, his mother an avid reader.
His father’s business collapsed after the stock market crash in The Miller’s moved to Brooklyn and Arthur had to work for two years after graduating from high school to raise enough funds to attend the University of Michigan.
Norton Anthology of American Literature, page 2460.

3. Notable Facts About Arthur Miller
He enrolled at the University of Michigan as a journalism student.
These were the years of the Spanish Civil War, the rise of fascism, and the attraction of Marxism as a way out of the Depression.
Miller’s own politics take shape. Marxism is an attractive ideology to those looking to cure the societal and economic ills of the Depression.

4. The Age of Hollywood Glamour

5. Selected Works of Arthur Miller
Miller also wrote a screenplay, The Misfits (1961), for his second wife, the actress Marilyn Monroe (1926–62); they were married from 1956 to The filming of The Misfits served as the basis for the play Finishing the Picture (2004). I Don’t Need You Any More, a collection of his short stories, appeared in 1967 and a collection of theatre essays in His autobiography, Timebends, was published in 1987.

6. Five Characteristics of American Drama
For much of American Drama the family is the central subject.
Most of Arthur Miller’s plays, as well, concentrate on the family and envision an ideal world, as perhaps, an enlarged family.
Often the protagonist’s sense of family draws him into a conflict with – and eventual doom in – the outside world.
Miller recognized that an ideal world is oftentimes a rationalization.
Miller’s treatment of the family leads to a treatment both of personal ideals and of the society within which families have to operate.
Norton Anthology of American Literature, page 2460

7. Works of Arthur Miller
The Crucible (1953) was based on the witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, a period Miller considered relevant to the 1950s, when investigation of subversive activities was widespread. In 1956, when Miller was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he refused to name people he had seen 10 years earlier at an alleged communist writers’ meeting. He was convicted of contempt but appealed and won.

8. What Arthur Miller Said About The Crucible …
In the 1950’s the hysterical search for supposed communist infiltration of American life reached its height, as Senator Joseph McCarthy summoned suspect after suspect to hearings in Washington.
Miller later said at this time he was reading a book on the Salem witch trials.
Norton Anthology of American Literature, page 2461

9. What Arthur Miller Said About The Crucible …
He saw that, “the main point of the hearings, precisely as in seventeenth century Salem, was that the accused make public confession, damn his confederates as well as his devil master, and guarantee his sterling new allegiance by breaking disgusting old vows – whereupon he was let loose to rejoin the society of extremely decent people.”
Norton Anthology of American Literature, page 2461

10. 1953
January
Miller's enduring historical drama The Crucible is staged and has a run of 197, a disappointment after Death of a Salesman. (It will not reach London until April 1956, where the Royal Court presents it 32 times.) Critics' responses are mixed, in large part because some consider the play a letdown after Salesman, while others are preoccupied with its analogy to the McCarthy hearings. In March 1958 it will be revived Off-Broadway in a production that is much better received and that Miller far prefers; this time it attains a run of 633. It will eventually become his most frequently revived play.

11. Notes on The Crucible
The script had its origin in April 1952, when Miller began studying the original court records of the Salem witch trials at the same time that people he admired were naming names to stay out of trouble with HUAC (notably Clifford Odets and Elia Kazan). He was struck by the similarity between the two witch hunts: in both cases a small group of zealots was creating a terrifying new "subjective reality," which gradually took on "a holy resonance" and engulfed a large number of people. This past phenomenon repeated in the present, Miller says, "underlies every word in The Crucible," even though he took care to avoid "pressing the allegory."

12. How was the play received?
In 1953, Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible" ran on Broadway at the Martin Beck. Despite being a box office success and acclaimed by critics and audiences alike, it was considered second-best to his prior "Death of a Salesman."  As Brook Atkinson for the New York Times reported the day after the opening, "[T]he theme does not develop with the simple eloquence of 'Death of a Salesman.'"  Although the events of the play are based on the events that took place in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, Miller was liberal in his fictionalization of those events.  For example, many of the accusations of witchcraft in the play are driven by the affair between farmer, husband, and father John Proctor (Arthur Kennedy), and the Minister's teenage niece Abigail Williams (Madeleine Sherwood); however, in real life Williams was probably about eleven at the time of the accusations and Proctor was over sixty, which makes it most unlikely that there was ever any such relationship.  Miller himself said, "The play is not reportage of any kind .... [n]obody can start to write a tragedy and hope to make it reportage .... what I was doing was writing a fictional story about an important theme." The "important theme" that Miller was writing about was clear to many observers in 1953 at the play's opening.  It was written in response to Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee's crusade against supposed communist sympathizers.  Despite the obvious political criticisms contained within the play, most critics felt that "The Crucible" was "a self contained play about a terrible period in American history."