Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the text
- Introduction
- 1 The Michigan plays
- 2 The Golden Years, The Half-Bridge, Boro Hall Nocturne
- 3 The radio plays
- 4 The Man Who Had All the Luck
- 5 Focus
- 6 All My Sons
- 7 Death of a Salesman
- 8 Arthur Miller: time-traveller
- 9 An Enemy of the People
- 10 The Crucible
- 11 A Memory of Two Mondays
- 12 A View from the Bridge
- 13 Tragedy
- 14 The Misfits
- 15 After the Fall
- 16 Incident at Vichy
- 17 The Price
- 18 The Creation of the World and Other Business
- 19 The Archbishop's Ceiling
- 20 Playing for Time
- 21 The shearing point
- 22 The American Clock
- 23 The one-act plays: Two-Way Mirror, and Danger: Memory!
- 24 The Ride Down Mount Morgan
- 25 The Last Yankee
- 26 Broken Glass
- 27 Mr Peters' Connections
- 28 Resurrection Blues
- 29 Finishing the Picture
- 30 Fiction
- 31 Arthur Miller as a Jewish writer
- Notes
- Index
31 - Arthur Miller as a Jewish writer
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the text
- Introduction
- 1 The Michigan plays
- 2 The Golden Years, The Half-Bridge, Boro Hall Nocturne
- 3 The radio plays
- 4 The Man Who Had All the Luck
- 5 Focus
- 6 All My Sons
- 7 Death of a Salesman
- 8 Arthur Miller: time-traveller
- 9 An Enemy of the People
- 10 The Crucible
- 11 A Memory of Two Mondays
- 12 A View from the Bridge
- 13 Tragedy
- 14 The Misfits
- 15 After the Fall
- 16 Incident at Vichy
- 17 The Price
- 18 The Creation of the World and Other Business
- 19 The Archbishop's Ceiling
- 20 Playing for Time
- 21 The shearing point
- 22 The American Clock
- 23 The one-act plays: Two-Way Mirror, and Danger: Memory!
- 24 The Ride Down Mount Morgan
- 25 The Last Yankee
- 26 Broken Glass
- 27 Mr Peters' Connections
- 28 Resurrection Blues
- 29 Finishing the Picture
- 30 Fiction
- 31 Arthur Miller as a Jewish writer
- Notes
- Index
Summary
This has been the story of Arthur Miller, whose people came from a world where to be Jewish was to draw down the lightning. He was born into a community which wrapped itself in mysteries for protection, and because buried at the heart of those mysteries was a vivifying hope. Later, there would be those who accused him of turning away not so much from a faith, which he did indeed abandon, as from an identity. His characters, it was suggested, were either studiously non-Jewish or denied roots revealed only in the language they deployed. He was, in short, a Jewish writer who hesitated to confess to his origins or address the major traumas of what he forbore to acknowledge as his people. It is a view which has such currency and which is so far from the truth that before ending our journey through his work it is worth pausing and asking how far the story of Arthur Miller is not only one of the making of a playwright but the making, more specifically, of a Jewish playwright?
Miller, like Delmore Schwartz, Alfred Kazin and Saul Bellow, came from a home where Yiddish was spoken, a reminder of another world, and other loyalties. America offered a promise of transformation, of reinvention. That promise was embraced by his parents, who first claimed and were then betrayed by the American dream. Miller himself had a double consciousness and that fact would be evident in the plays he wrote over seventy years.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Arthur MillerA Critical Study, pp. 473 - 489Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004