Paper Summary:

The paper describes how Arthur Miller, the 20th century playwright and social commentator, used his works to provide penetrating insight into the social and political climate of the United States during tense and volatile periods of the 1940s and 50s. The paper discusses references to the Great Depression, the McCarthyism period and the Holocaust genocide. The paper looks at Miller's background and explores his many plays and novels that reflect his life and the society he lived in.

From the Paper:

"Miller attended the University of Michigan, which had a reputation as a radical campus. With the group of others he ran a student newspaper. Five of his friends went to the Spanish Civil War; one died, another was severely wounded. He was tempted to go himself but there were causes closer to home. Down the road in Detroit, Henry Ford hired "Nazi storm troopers" to run the factory. "Spain," He insisted, "was in Detroit." He developed his radicalism through a series of student plays, two of which won, and another was runner-up for the annual Hopwood Award (Freedman)."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Arnes, William. "Tragic Form and the Possibility of Meaning in Death of a Salesman." Furman Study. (1949): 10-19.
• "Arthur Miller." Platform Papers. Vol. II. London: Royal National Theatre, 1995).
• Bigsby, C. W. E. "Arthur Miller." In Confrontation and Commitment: A Study of Contemporary American Drama. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1967.
• Freedman, Morris. "Bertolt Brecht and American Social Drama." The Moral Impulse: Modern Drama from Ibsen to the Present, 99-114. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1967.
• Hurd, Gyles R. "Angels and Anxieties in Miller's A View from the Bridge." Notes on Contemporary Literature 13, no. 9 (1983): 4-6.

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